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Winning at work: Why hot-desking and open-plan offices are bad for you

Flexible workspaces that encourage collaboration and creativity are all the rage. But they ignore basic human psychology – and they could be counterproductive

By Yvaine Ye

8 January 2019

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Solent News/REX/Shutterstock

I have serious office envy. Perhaps I shouldn’t ever google “world’s coolest workspace” or look at the glossies. All I see are interiors with vast walls covered in plants, flooded with natural light; huge rooms full of sleek, wooden furniture, and not a dangling cable in sight; swing chairs, beanbags, even giant slides instead of staircases.

Instead, here I am in New Scientist‘s US office, where three of us inhabit a smaller room in a larger co-working space. There is a flimsy wall separating us from the office next door, where the noise level is often beyond the pale (see “Winning at work: How to stay focused and avoid distractions”). Outside our door, a larger open-plan space is packed with dozens of people with little room to spread out. Workers of the world, unite?

Modern toss work cartoon

How to win at work

Make your work work better for you – from dealing with pesky colleagues to taking the perfect break and doing less for more money

Many of us spend more of our waking hours at work than we do at home, so it is reasonable to want a comfortable, functional and fun place to work in. Trouble is, there are no universal definitions of comfortable, functional and fun. What is clear, though, is that most of the received wisdom about how to design an office is questionable at best.

Two trends have dominated workplace design in the past few decades: open-plan offices, where everyone sits in the same space, and “non-territorial” or hot-desking offices, where no one has their own place.

The stated aim of both is to foster creativity…

Article amended on 6 February 2019

We updated Casey Lindberg’s affiliation

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