Back to Your Cubicle? The Open Office Plan Is a Straight-Up Failure

The latest office design trend is called the "Open Office Plan" or OOP for short. This is supposed to encourage communication, collaboration, and transparency. It caught on quickly, but as employees settled in, they realized the concept sucks worse than being trapped in a cubicle next to someone eating a tuna fish sandwich.🐟🥪What’s worse is that Open Office Plans actually make work MORE difficult and employees LESS productive. 

Here’s Five Fast Facts about Open Office Plans.:

1. 🏢 How Bad Is It? - More than 70% of offices in the U.S. have an OOP, and 95% of employees working in them hate it because they want privacy.
2. 💰 But Why, Tho? - The concept has become popular, in part, because it’s way cheaper than a standard layout with cubicles. How cheap? We’re talking 50%.
3. 🦠 Unhealthy - OOPs impact employee health and well-being, with 90% of workers saying they experience increased stress, conflict, and high blood pressure. Employees stuck in the setup also take 62% more sick days than people in cubicles.
4. 🖥️ Sorry, What? - Productivity takes a big hit, too. Workers lose an average of 86 minutes a day due to distractions.
5. 🙄 Don’t Look At Me - As for that collaboration thing, it’s been found that an OOP actually decreases face-to-face interaction by 70%, while increasing virtual interaction by email or instant messaging services.
   
   

🔥Bottom line: Hopefully this nonsense is a trend on the way out. But until the priority is put back on the employees and not on the bottom line, this fad is here to stay in more than a few companies.

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Do you work in an OOP?

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