Tearing down the walls cut face-to-face talk by 70 percent
Two companies switched to open offices to spark more collaboration. Sociometric badges caught what actually happened.
The pitch for the open office has always been proximity: put people in the same unobstructed room and collaboration follows, the walls having been the only thing in the way. It's intuitive enough that companies have spent decades tearing out cubicles on the strength of it.
In 2018, Harvard's Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban tested the pitch directly. They studied two corporate headquarters in the middle of transitions to open-plan offices, fitting employees with sociometric badges that tracked face-to-face contact, alongside email and instant-message logs, before and after the walls came down.
Face-to-face interaction didn't rise. It fell — by roughly 70% in both companies — while electronic messaging rose to fill the gap. Stripped of the visual privacy that cubicles and doors provided, people didn't turn to their now-visible neighbors more; they responded by pulling inward, adopting headphones, screens, and Slack as a substitute boundary now that the architectural one was gone.
The result runs against decades of received wisdom that physical proximity reliably breeds collaboration. It doesn't, when the proximity comes at the cost of privacy people still want. Given a room with no walls, most people build their own — they just build them out of behavior instead of drywall.