The snowball effect of the open office space

In the open office space. Doing your best to focus on your work for hours on end and make as few mistakes as possible. You sit behind a desk that belongs to everyone or could belong to everyone; there’s nothing fun or personal on it. While you’re working, you can hear the colleague who has been on holiday tell his story about 8 times. You hear a colleague having a difficult conversation with a customer on the phone. There is a colleague standing next to your desk with a question for you. Then there’s some fun going around. Some good jokes are made and you join in wholeheartedly. On busy days it is a madhouse in the morning. On the agreed office day, it is quiet in the room, because several colleagues are wearing noise-canceling earphones. In winter or during heat waves, you have freezing cold hands and feet. Several colleagues get stuck in programs. You immediately find out that there is a malfunction. Every now and then you have a headache, because it is moldy in the room. At the end of the day, you come home tired and need time to recover from work.

Setting boundaries

A colleague puts on some music. Or a colleague has a telephone appointment and completes this appointment in the same room without earphones, so you hear both sides of the conversation for half an hour. The music or the telephone appointment annoys you. You can’t think straight anymore. You want to say something, but you don’t know how to do it gently. You don’t say anything.

Next time, you’re pondering whether you’re going to say something. This time you try to address the colleague in a friendly manner. The colleague responds with scornful remarks and reluctantly concedes. The stimuli are gone, but the unpleasant reaction lingers.

Increased intensity

After a meeting with colleagues, customer or manager, you take a seat at your desk. Immediately a colleague comes to ask you questions or you get a call. You’re tired of the conversation, but there’s no room to unwind. If something unpleasant happened in the conversation, there is no privacy to recover from it. You continue the day with an unpleasant feeling.

The snowball gets caught in a vicious circle

You’re tired. More often there are periods you can’t think clearly. You get stuck in your head. You make more mistakes and it bothers you that you make such stupid mistakes. You don’t react well to situations, colleagues and customers. Even though you are friendly and fun, at work you are more likely to have hassles and maybe even conflicts with the people around you. You call in sick for a few days to relax.

You remain tired. You’re taking a few days off.

You remain tired. You call in sick for a longer duration.

You end up in sick leave. Now try to reintegrate while in an open office space.

Back to the snowflake

Not with everyone the snowball grows so large. It depends on many factors. However, the importance of open office spaces is overlooked. Employers do not see they do everything they can to break the focus of their employees. Poorer performance, more errors, high absenteeism and long sickness leaves are the fault of the employers. If we want to stop the snowball effect, we need more than the half-baked solutions of agreements about phoning in the open office space, the use of quiet rooms, sound-absorbing partitions or working from home.

Employers and trade unions, I ask you to ensure employees can concentrate optimally on their work. Give each employee a workspace in a room with no more than 2 other colleagues. Make sure these are quiet spaces, so few calls, no music, no conversations longer than fifteen minutes. This will make us much more relaxed and ultimately happier.