How do you design an office where people connect (without losing focus)?

I have always been fascinated by interior design. Not in the ‘throw a blanket casually over the couch’ kind of way but what it does to how people behave in a space and what kind of collaboration or thinking it creates. I have the luxury that I get to visit a lot of offices of other companies, and I noticed something last time I stepped into an open plan office. I used to hear the complaint that open plan offices were dreaded because of the noise. But this one was dead silent. People were there but there was almost no talking. There were no signs of collaboration or sparks of energy. So, this made me wonder:   

How do you design an office where people connect (without losing their focus)? And what can we take from the answers into the rest of our lives? 

Before we get to the answer, it is good to know that this almost awkward silence in open offices is one of the best documented findings in Behavioural Design. The ‘funny’ thing is that two Fortune 500 companies removed the walls in their offices to stimulate the opposite: to spark collaboration on the logical assumption that fewer boundaries would make the free flow of ideas easier.  
 
However, the Harvard researcher Ethan Bernstein measured what really happened with wearable sensors and server data, before and after. Face to face interaction did not rise. It fell by around seventy per cent, while email and messaging went up. People put on headphones and emailed a colleague a metre away (Bernstein and Turban, Royal Society B, 2018). The principle is about privacy and control.  
 
We have a deep need to regulate when we are observed, and when that control is taken away, we claim it back the only way left to us, by withdrawing.  
 
Strip out every wall and you do not remove the need for privacy; you just force people to manufacture it with headphones and withdrawn behaviour. The room built for contact produced retreat. 

So, what can you do with this insight? When you see collaboration drop, your instinct might be to change the people. Far more often it is the room talking. Behavioural Design starts there: you fix the room, not the people.  
 
If you want people to connect, your move should be counterintuitive. You don’t remove boundaries; you might need to add some.  
 
So how do you design for connection rather than demand it? Here are three practical moves: 

And yes, sometimes we do need to focus. So headphones can be perfectly fine. A little shake and dance behind the desk never hurt the office mood either. With enough connection throughout the day, these become a way to recharge rather than to hide. 

Offer people a small coffee and a large, and many take the small. Add a medium priced just below the large, and suddenly the large looks like a bargain and sales of it jump. Nothing about the large changed. What changed is that the medium became a decoy, a reference point that makes the option beside it look like obvious value. Behavioural scientists call this the decoy effect, and it shapes far more of our choosing than we notice. The lesson is not to manipulate; it is to realise that no option is judged on its own.  
 
We decide by comparison, always.  
 
So, when you present a choice, whether a price, a proposal or a plan, ask what it is sitting next to, because the neighbouring option is quietly doing half the deciding. Change the comparison and you change the choice, without touching the thing itself. 

See you next week!

Astrid Groenewegen

Co-Founder of SUE | Behavioural Design Academy, Author of 'The Art of Designing Behaviour' / 'De Kunst van Gedrag Ontwerpen' and ‘De Gelukscode’.

Source 

Bernstein, E. S., and Turban, S. (2018). The impact of the 'open' workspace on human collaboration. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 373(1753), 20170239.