While they might boost productivity on days when employees are present, switched-on, and raring to go, open-plan workspaces come with a catch: a higher incidence of sick leave taken by workers.
Reasons for the phenomenon are twofold: a workplace culture that requires presence at the desk sees ill employees spreading germs to their healthy co-workers, compounded by the fact that airborne germs can travel up to six feet from the source - whether it's a cough, sneeze, or splutter. Researchers from the Stress Research Institute and the Psychology Department, both of Sweden's Stockholm University, also pointed to a lack of privacy and autonomy over one's personal space, both of which could contribute to the spread and control of harmful germs.
"A prospective study of the office environment's effect on employees is motivated by the high rates of sick leaves in the workforce," the authors wrote. "The results indicate differences between office types, depending on the number of people sharing workspace and the opportunity to exert personal control as influenced by the features that define the office types."
The research analyzed data from nearly 2,000 people who populated seven different workspaces. Three of those workspaces were open plan, with employees in those settings found more susceptible to illness. The numbers suggest that women who work in exclusively open plan spaces are more likely to capitalize on their sick days, though conversely, open plan spaces with meeting rooms peppered throughout the floor plan saw male absenteeism escalate.
The study was published in the January edition of Ergonomics, and calls into question the benefits of an open plan office. While the trend of open plan workspaces gained momentum as it became recognized as a means of bolstering productivity by fostering a collaborative, encouraging work environment, the study questions how sustainable this spike in productivity is when it means losing crucial days to illness.
However, the authors of the study also note that there are significant limitations to their findings, pointing out that responses to the study were self-reported, and baseline health was not adjusted to accommodate for variations. However, the study is vital in establishing a first step towards further research on environmental influence on work habits and associated illness. "To summarise, the results of this explorative study should only be viewed a first step in the investigation of the long-term effect of the office environment's impact on employee sickness absence," they wrote. "These results can thus only be viewed as indications of the possible effect of office type on sickness absence. Future studies need a more precise study design focused on the office environment in order to establish if these preliminary results on a prospective association between office type and sickness absence hold true or not."
