Research assessing the how employees of the Government of Canada communicate and collaborate in open-plan workspaces
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Why Do This Research?
The idea to evaluate communication and collaboration in open-concept office spaces came from personally-experiencing moving from a traditional, cubicle model to a hot-desking set-up within the Government of Canada and the changes in the ways I interacted with colleagues before and after the move. I also observed differences in how colleagues interacted with each other in different spaces of the office and wanted to investigate my observations further.
Open-concept workplaces are thought to foster collaboration and innovation due to the visual and aural proximity of colleagues.
Increasingly-popular among large corporations and public sector organizations is the open-concept/open-plan office, which is thought to increase communication and productivity in the workplace by sitting colleagues in close proximity to one another without walls or doors. Open-concept workplaces are thought to foster collaboration and innovation due to the visual and aural proximity of colleagues. Other advantages of the open-concept workplace model include financial savings for the employer, such as a reduced office footprint (and therefore reduced rent price) and reduced utilities costs (heating, etc.).
My personal experience in moving from a cubicle to an open-concept office was difficult at first, as not only did I move to a new office, but I also started a new job with tasks that were completely foreign to me. The transition from my much-loved, well-decorated cubicle to a daily game of “which desk can I use today” was made particularly difficult by the fact that I am slow to warm up to new people and new situations. The daily stress of finding an unoccupied desk and trying to figure out which of my colleagues were somewhere in the office - versus working from home or working from another office owned by the same organization - led to a significant decrease in my communication and collaboration. If I didn't know where a colleague was, I was less likely to try to make contact with them.
The daily stress of finding an unoccupied desk and trying to figure out which of my colleagues were somewhere in the office led to a significant decrease in my communication and collaboration.
Through this research, I hope to either confirm my observations or disprove them by employing the scientific method, collecting data, and inferring conclusions that are supported by this and previous studies. Is it just my experience, or do employees interact less in open-concept offices?
Research Questions
The main research question of this study is the following:
How do open-concept and activity-based workplaces within the Government of Canada affect communication and knowledge-sharing between individuals, units, and within the organization as a whole?
Within this question, I intend to look at the following sub-questions:
What types of communication take place between employees?
Where in the office do employees communicate the most and the least?
Which modes of communication are most-frequently and least-frequently used between employees in open-concept offices?
How does communication in the open-concept office impact individual productivity?
Do open-concept workplaces lead to increased knowledge-sharing behaviours and actions?
Are team/unit meetings more frequent in the open-concept office model?
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The limitations of this study include only looking at the open-concept/open-plan offices that are owned or rented by the Government of Canada, and does not include co-presence offices, nor does it examine the discourse of interactions between employees. Unlike other similar studies, it focuses solely on communication and knowledge-sharing between colleagues, not on the design aesthetics of the office space that influence productivity nor job satisfaction.
Literature Review
Nearly all of the studies concluded that trust, more than walls, cubicles, doors, and meeting spaces, was conducive to collaboration and knowledge-sharing within a shared office space.
There is little consensus as to whether open-plan offices foster or hinder knowledge-sharing in the workplace. Common challenges of these office-spaces include a lack of privacy for the trade-off of transparency and distractions due to increased audio and visual cues.
Appel-Meulenbroek (2010) studied whether the proximity of workers had an effect on knowledge-sharing behaviours within an office space, concluding that co-located colleagues had better interpersonal connectivity, perhaps due to more visual contact between each other, which cubicle workers lacked.
Also important were the variety of tasks that employees had to perform each day, namely solitary and team activities, each requiring different spaces. Heerwagen, Kampschroer, Powell, and Loftness (2004) concluded that quiet time for concentration throughout the day as well as socialization for knowledge-transfer were essential for striking a balance between individual and group activities, which, when balanced correctly, led to success in an open-concept office.
Nearly all of the studies reviewed (Appel-Meulenbroek (2010); Heerwagen, Kampschroer, Powell, and Loftness (2004); Appel-Muelenbroek, Vries, and Weggeman (2017); Wieja-Perree et al. (2019); Hua, Loftness, Heerwagen, and Powell (2010)) concluded that trust, more than walls, cubicles, doors, and meeting spaces, was conducive to collaboration and knowledge-sharing within a shared office space and the best predictor of communication between employees. As well, activity-based workplaces are relied on as a solution to open-concept offices, where activities requiring concentration, such as report-writing and telephone calls are conducted in closed-off, individual quiet spaces, while meeting rooms separate from the general office areas and units in constant close proximity to each other have the ability to foster communication, knowledge-sharing, and innovation.
Methodology
For this study, I intend to employ a synchronous, mixed-methods approach to gathering data that focuses on capturing real-time interactions between employees in an open-plan office space and supplementing those interactions with employee-recorded contextual data. The study requires at least one year to be completed and would rely on a team of researchers, likely research assistants from a local university, based on predictions of the volume of data to sift through and code.
Based on the study by Bernstein and Turban (2018), in which geolocators were worn by employees in two workplaces with proximity sensors placed in “meeting spaces,” such as hallways, kitchens, and meeting rooms, I would like to replicate this study in a few office spaces occupied by the Government of Canada over the course of a few weeks to a month. Participants would be recruited by contacting managers and directors in known open-concept office spaces as well as more traditional cubicle-based offices. Individual participants in both of these workplaces would then be recruited based on approval from management and a call for participants by email.
All participants of the study would be asked to wear sensors that would transmit data such as their participant number, the location of their interactions with other colleagues also participating in the study, and the length of their interactions.
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All participants of the study would be asked to wear sensors that would transmit data such as their participant number, the location of their interactions with other colleagues also participating in the study, and the length of their interaction. As a control group, a traditional cubicle workplace also occupied by the Government of Canada in a similar domain would also be asked to participate in this study. Both offices would also be fitted with sensors in strategically-placed locations to capture the data about each participant’s interactions. This technique of data collection removes the need for participants to record the exact location and length of their interactions with colleagues. It also removes the need for cameras to capture data, which could be seen as a privacy violation. Finally, this data collection technique allows for the automatic collection of data without the need for researchers to manually input data, which saves time and money for other research activities.
To supplement the automatic collection of quantitative data, participants in both office types will also be asked to carry a journal and record the nature of the communication or knowledge-sharing with each colleague they interact with during the study period.
To supplement the automatic collection of quantitative data, participants in both office types will also be asked to carry a journal and record the nature of the communication or knowledge-sharing with each colleague they interact with during the study period. I have not yet figured out exactly how participants will record the nature of their interactions with colleagues, however, generally, I want to look at coding the data as either “personal,” in which case I will not further look into it, or “professional.” The data in the journals would be freeform, which would then be coded by the researchers. An example of an interaction could be recorded as “talked with [Sam] about setting up a meeting to discuss the new specifications for the project,” which could then be coded as “professional - collaborative” or something similar. The idea behind using geolocators and a journal is that the geolocators eliminate self-reporting bias and iffy timelines from the journals, while the journals provide additional context to the interactions between employees that the geolocators cannot.
The methodology of the study has not yet been completely fleshed out, but hopefully from comments received, a more robust methodology could be developed.