Open plan offices as sociotechnical systems: What matters and to whom?

Background: Open plan offices have proliferated for the past several decades with more and more workers being concentrated in office buildings. Several studies have identified a number of negative factors associated with open plan offices, and those include noise, speech interference, lack of privacy, and a perceived loss of control over work. While negative factors have been identified several times in the literature, many studies rely on either surveys or highly controlled environments.

Objective: The objective of this study was to use a quasi-naturalistic environment based on a scaled world model to test three hypotheses of the impacts of office interference on editing and web navigation performance and mental workload.

Method: A mixed factor design was used that utilized continuous speech recordings, discontinuous speech recordings, and a quiet condition. Individual differences questionnaires were administered to measure focused attention, stress, and cognitive failures. After task completion, participants recorded mental workload ratings.

Results: Participants had higher performance accuracy in the document editing task across the speech interference conditions. Mental workload ratings were higher in the web navigation task in the discontinuous speech condition compared to the continuous speech condition. In contrast to the hypothesis, those reporting stronger focused attention performed more poorly across all speech conditions. Overall, the results were mixed.

Conclusions: OPO work design must focus on individual differences among workers to determine how to customize design to facilitate performance.