The Open Office Was Never About Collaboration. It Was About Surveillance.

The open-plan office was sold to workers as a collaboration-enabling innovation. The research on whether it achieved this is unambiguous: it did not. Studies consistently show that open offices reduce spontaneous face-to-face interaction, increase digital communication as a substitute for conversations people do not want overheard, and significantly damage both concentration and job satisfaction.

Despite this evidence, which has been available for over a decade, open offices became and remain the dominant model for knowledge work. The question worth asking is: if they do not achieve the stated purpose, whose purpose do they serve?

The Surveillance Advantage

An open office makes every worker visible to management at all times. Who is at their desk. What is on their screen. Who they are talking to. When they arrive and leave. The entire workforce can be monitored continuously without any monitoring infrastructure beyond the physical layout of the room.

This is enormously useful for a management model built on the premise that workers require oversight to be productive. The open office does not just enable surveillance. It normalises it. Workers who grow up professionally in open offices internalise the expectation of being watched as a neutral feature of work rather than an imposition.

The worker who understands themselves as performing for an audience at all times is a worker whose self-management does a significant part of the manager's job. The performance of busyness, the management of visibility, the awareness of being seen: these produce compliance at no direct cost to the organisation.

The Concentration Problem

Knowledge work requires extended periods of uninterrupted concentration. The research on cognitive performance consistently shows that complex thinking, creative problem-solving, and deep analysis require sustained focus that is broken by interruption and nearly impossible to re-establish quickly.

Open offices produce an average interruption every three minutes in some studies. Recovery to full focus after an interruption takes over twenty minutes. The arithmetic is brutal: a worker in an open office who receives average interruption frequency is never doing their best work. They are perpetually in the shallow zone of partial attention.

This does not reduce their apparent productivity. It reduces the quality of their thinking while maintaining the visible performance of activity. In organisations that reward visible activity over measurable output quality, this trade is invisible and acceptable. In organisations trying to produce genuinely excellent work, it is a permanent structural tax on the quality of thinking.

Why Remote Work Revealed Everything

The pandemic forced a large-scale experiment in remote work. For many knowledge workers, productivity increased. Research from Stanford and others found that remote workers were more productive on tasks requiring concentration, reported higher job satisfaction, and showed lower attrition rates.

The response from many organisations was not to accept this evidence and restructure accordingly. It was to mandate returns to the office, often explicitly justified by concerns about culture and collaboration, but timed and framed in ways that made the surveillance function difficult to miss.

When an organisation insists that workers physically attend a location where the research shows they will produce lower quality work, it is prioritising something other than the work. The most parsimonious explanation is that it is prioritising oversight. Oversight serves management more than it serves output. Its persistence despite evidence against its productivity benefits is what you would predict if it were primarily serving management needs rather than organisational ones.

The Worker's Position

Understanding this does not necessarily change your situation. Most workers cannot unilaterally redesign their working environment. But it changes the framing.

When a return-to-office mandate is presented as being about collaboration and culture, and the evidence about your actual productivity in the office versus at home is different from what the mandate implies, you are being asked to accept a management preference framed as an organisational necessity. These are different things. You are entitled to know which one it is, even if the answer does not change the outcome.

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Further reading:

• corporate culture as a control mechanism
• the managers who love open offices most