the value of privacy in workplace design_

Apart from the obvious benefits of privacy, this article challenges whether we are fully aware of?all?the different ways that lack of privacy might influence our thinking and behaviour... Further than simply asking people for their self-reports, this visits various studies and reports to gather an evidence-based understanding?of how a lack of privacy impacts our decision making.

Back, in 2018, Wilma Koutstaal, Ph.D., a psychology professor, wrote an article in Psychology Today. Whilst, yes agree, it was a few years ago her article questioned "How might a lack of privacy influence our creative thinking?" which is in turn a very relevant and interesting topic we are finding in the workspace today.

Let's take a look at the two highly creative experimental approaches and the unique insights they provide on the creativity-to-privacy connection.

1. adding privacy : the curtain study

A very large factory that produced mobile phones and other digital devices had a massive open floor plan where the workers on the production lines and the supervisors were continually and readily seen.

What would happen to production speed and quality if some of the lines were surrounded by a group privacy curtain – something like a large hospital-style privacy curtain? And what if an "undercover observer" could be inside the curtain-surrounded lines, performing their required work but also taking note of what went on behind the curtain?

Researchers randomly chose 4 of the 32 production lines in the factory to be surrounded by a privacy curtain. The curtain remained in place not just for a day or for a few days, but for several months.

so what happened?

Teams on the lines surrounded by a privacy curtain showed higher?productivity (more units per hour) and the quality of their work increased. They also showed more improvisations in how their work was completed.

The relatively heightened privacy afforded by the curtain allowed temporary smaller issues to be solved locally. Rather than either calling on help from higher management, or hiding new experimental problem-solving methods from others, solutions could be shared with other workers on the line.

Observations by the undercover researchers revealed that the workers actively switched roles to learn multiple tasks, particularly at stations immediately adjacent to their own. This fostered greater cross-support in the team, fluid adaptation, experimentation, and learning.

The privacy curtain allowed the workers on the line greater freedom to collaborate and discuss new ideas and to iteratively test and try process improvements, arriving at successful prototypes before sharing them with outsiders. It formed a “scrutiny-reduced” supportive making-and-finding environment where both the workers and the line managers could adaptively experiment with an increased degree of autonomy.

Perhaps counterintuitively, greater privacy led to more sharing, group knowledge, and collaborative experimentation.

2. removing privacy: the electronic monitoring study

"Open Company 1" is a Fortune 500 multinational company. At its global headquarters the company decided to transform one of its floors to a completely open, transparent, and boundaryless space. In the new space, there would be no walls and no partitions between the office workstations. There would be more than one hundred employees on the floor, working in diverse functional areas ranging from technology and sales to finance and product development.

Learning of the company's imminent floor-change plan,?researchers?asked the employees to take part in a study that would track who talked with whom, and when, and how.

but there were several twists...

First, the tracking of their interactions would cover a period of 15 workdays before the move, and also a period of 15 workdays after the move. The post-move tracking would not begin immediately but a few months later. This gap would give everyone some time to adjust to their new environment and an opportunity to settle into their modes of working there. A two-month gap also allowed the data collection to occur at a similar point in the company's quarterly cycle, so that the employees' work demands would be comparatively similar for the two recording periods.

The other twists were all technology-related. Participants who agreed to take part in the study were asked to wear a small infrared sensor on a lanyard that recorded, with a high level of detail, each of their face-to-face interactions with others. Participants would also be asked to wear, on the lanyard, a tiny microphone that would capture if they were speaking or listening (but not the content of what was said), and two other tracking devices — an accelerometer that would record their body movements and posture, and a Bluetooth sensor that would capture their spatial location.

All of the recordings would be time-stamped in intervals of 10 milliseconds. In addition, these data would be combined with the information from the participants' company email account, particularly information about who they e-mailed, copied, or blind copied, and their instant messages from the same periods.

the test results...

A total of 52 participants (about 40% of all those who moved to the new space) agreed to participate. Across the pre-move and post-move recordings, this yielded a very large dataset: 96,778 face-to-face interactions, 84,026 emails, and 25,691 instant messages (consisting of 221,426 words).

Analyzing this data it revealed that participants, after the move to the open office plan, now spent much less time, not more time, in face-to-face interactions.

The data also showed that teams on the lines surrounded by a privacy curtain had higher?productivity and the quality of their work increased. They also showed more improvisations in how their work was completed.

Before the move they spent around 6 hours in face-to-face interaction per person per day. After the redesign this dropped dramatically: the same people now spent only slightly more than 1.5 hours in face-to-face interaction.

The amount of interaction that took place over email and instant messaging greatly increased:

1. Emails sent increased by 56%
2. Emails received increased by 20%
3. CC'd emails increased by 41%
4. Instant messages increased by 67%
5. Words sent on IM increased by 75%

But the unwelcome effects of the move did not end there. When executives at the company were asked – in confidence - about how the redesign of the floor had influenced performance, they confided that their internal performance metrics showed a noticeable drop in the quality of employees work.

A?second study?by the same researchers at a different Fortune 500 company ("Open Company 2") again looking at the types of interactions of about 100 employees, before and after they were assigned to an open floor, yielded very similar outcomes. There were dramatic decreases in the amount of time spent interacting face-to-face – even for employees who were physically quite near to one another.

3. summary : what are we to make of all this?

those stats and figures are pretty eye opening!

What we can see from the 2 studies is how our working environments play a key role in human behaviour, our creativity and productivity. As counterintuitive as it may seem privacy is not only for quite time, focus tasks and one-to-one meetings. Privacy is a huge factor in creating team collaboration opportunities.

When exposed in an open-plan office, as humans, we feel discouraged from having conversations with other colleagues. When we are seen and heard by many others trying to do their own work, and for whom our conversation is irrelevant and distracting, it discourages us from trying new ideas, problem solving and exploring new innovations.

Curtains provide a that visual option to zone and define spaces. They are truly a sustainable, flexible and elegant alternative to traditional partitioning.

Strategically based in Gatwick and London, Stansons are 100% focused on supporting workplace creators in the design, make and install of acoustics, blinds and curtains.

4. references

Bernstein, E. S. (2012). The transparency paradox: A role for privacy in organizational learning and operational control.?Administrative Science Quarterly, 57, 181–216.

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

Danielsson, C. B., & Bodin, L. (2008). Office type in relation to health, well-being, and job satisfaction among employees.?Environment and Behavior, 40, 636–668.

Haapakangas, A., Hongisto, V., Vargo, J., & Lahtinen, M. (2018). Benefits of quiet workspaces in open-plan offices: Evidence from two office relocations.?Journal of Environmental Psychology, 56, 63–75.

Pautasso, M., & Van der Werf, W. (2017). How to cope with working in an open-space lab??European Review, 25, 679–687.