Why Workplace Planning Boosts Outcome
For two decades, the argument for open-plan offices was based on a single premise: remove the walls and people will collaborate more. It was intuitive, justified increased density, and was almost never tested. In 2018, it was properly tested, and the results were the opposite.
When two Fortune 500 headquarters switched to open layouts, face-to-face interaction dropped by approximately 70%. People didn't say much. They left, put on headphones, and switched the conversation to email.
That finding is the most compelling argument for workplace planning as a discipline because it shows that spatial decisions produce behavioral outcomes that intuition incorrectly predicts.
Why Workplace Planning boosts outcome?
Workplace planning improves outcomes because the allocation of space influences behavior, and the relationships involved are frequently unexpected. According to research conducted at two corporate headquarters using wearable sensors, transitioning to open plan reduced face-to-face interaction by approximately 70% while increasing electronic communication, reversing the assumption on which the layout was built. Effective planning begins with measurement rather than assumption: understanding how space is actually used, what tasks it must support, and what the trade-off between privacy and interaction costs are. The result is a mix of settings tailored to actual work patterns rather than a density target, and success is measured by behavior and satisfaction rather than the number of people accommodated per square meter.
The study that changed the argument
Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban conducted two intervention-based field studies at corporate headquarters transitioning to more open office space, published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (Bernstein & Turban, 2018). The method is what makes the result credible. Rather than relying on self-reported activity logs, which earlier studies had used, participants wore sociometric badges containing an infrared sensor recording who they faced, microphones capturing whether they were speaking or listening without recording content, an accelerometer capturing movement and posture, and a Bluetooth sensor capturing location.
Electronic communication was measured directly from email and instant messaging server logs (Bernstein & Turban, 2018). The volume of face-to-face interaction decreased significantly, by approximately 70 percent, in both cases, with an associated increase in electronic interaction. The authors concluded that rather than prompting more vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and instant messaging (Bernstein & Turban, 2018). Reporting on the studies noted that employees became more reluctant to give negative feedback or raise sensitive issues in front of colleagues, which pushed those exchanges into private channels (World Economic Forum, 2018).
This was the first study to measure both face-to-face and electronic interaction before and after adopting open architecture (Bernstein & Turban, 2018).
Why removing boundaries reduces talking
The mechanism is worth understanding because it applies beyond offices. Conversation necessitates some degree of privacy. A discussion that can be overheard by twenty people differs from one that cannot, and people adapt accordingly. When you remove the boundary, you create an audience rather than an opportunity to speak.
The relationship between office characteristics and employee reaction has been studied since long before open plan became the norm, with early research demonstrating that openness and density affect satisfaction independently of one another (Oldham & Rotchford 1983). This relates to a well-established finding in more recent workplace research.
According to an analysis of open-plan environments, the trade-off between privacy and communication is central to workspace satisfaction, with the benefits of easier communication frequently outweighed by the drawbacks of reduced privacy.
The acoustic literature explains some of the cost. Intelligible speech interferes with concentration in ways that unintelligible background noise does not (Haka et al., 2009), implying that the same openness that allows you to hear a colleague's conversation also makes it impossible to ignore. Acoustic intervention has been shown in refurbishment studies to significantly improve environmental and job satisfaction (Hongisto, Haapakangas, Varjo, Helenius, & Koskela, 2016). Planning that ignores this results in a space that is both bad for conversation and bad for concentration.
What planning actually decides
The common misconception is that workplace layout determines how many desks can fit. It determines something more important: what types of work the building allows. Every organization engages in a variety of activities with incompatible spatial requirements.
Individual work requires acoustic separation and freedom from interruption. Adjacent spaces and work surfaces are required for collaborative work. Confidential conversations require enclosure. Video calls necessitate acoustic isolation in both directions, a requirement that existed only a decade ago but now consumes a significant portion of the day.
Social interaction requires an environment that is not a workstation. A plan that only allows for one type of setting forces all of these into an unsatisfactory compromise. The planning question is thus the ratio of settings, not the number of any of them.
Measure before you allocate.
The discipline's first step is establishing how space is currently used, because assumed use and actual use diverge substantially. Long-running survey programs measuring occupant satisfaction across large numbers of buildings have found acoustic and privacy conditions to be among the most consistently poorly rated aspects of office environments (Frontczak et al., 2012), which suggests where measurement is most likely to find problems. Utilization studies typically reveal two things simultaneously.
Assigned desks sit empty a large share of the working week, and the meeting rooms are fully booked while sitting half occupied, because a two-person conversation has taken a room built for eight. Both are allocation failures rather than capacity failures, and both are invisible without measurement. This matters more since attendance became variable.
A workplace planned for a headcount that never all attends at once is oversized on average and undersized on peak days, and resolving that requires knowing the actual distribution rather than the total.
The same measurement discipline that produces a baseline also produces the evidence to evaluate the result, which is why post-occupancy evaluation belongs in workplace projects as a standard rather than as an extra.
The environmental floor
No amount of clever planning compensates for an environment that impairs the people in it, and the evidence here is strong. Controlled research found cognitive function scores substantially higher under enhanced ventilation conditions, with carbon dioxide and volatile organic compounds independently associated with performance (Allen, MacNaughton, Satish, Santanam, Vallarino, & Spengler, 2016).
A field study across ten high-performing buildings found participants within the standard thermal comfort zone performed around 5 percent better on cognitive simulations than those outside it (MacNaughton et al., 2017).
Reviews of ventilation and office work have found consistent associations between higher outdoor air supply rates and improved performance (Seppanen, Fisk, & Lei, 2006), an effect documented alongside perceived air quality and self-reported productivity in earlier controlled work (Wargocki, Wyon, Sundell, Clausen, & Fanger, 2000).
Density interacts directly with all three. Increasing occupancy raises heat load, carbon dioxide concentration, and noise simultaneously, which means a density decision is also an air quality decision and an acoustic decision whether or not anyone treats it that way.
Activity based working, honestly
The most common contemporary response to the settings problem is activity-based working, in which employees have no assigned desk and instead choose among setting types according to task. The logic follows directly from the analysis above, and the approach can work.
But the evidence is mixed rather than uniformly positive, and the failure modes are predictable. If the mix of settings does not match the actual distribution of work, people queue for the scarce type and settle for the wrong one. If enclosed focus space is undersupplied, the arrangement becomes open plan with extra steps, and studies of desk-sharing environments have reported costs to concentration, territoriality, and time lost locating colleagues alongside the intended benefits (Hirst, 2011).
And if the change is introduced primarily to reduce floor area, occupants correctly perceive it as a cost exercise and resist accordingly. The honest position is that activity-based working is a plan that requires accurate inputs, not a solution that works by adoption. Given the open plan findings, the burden of proof sits with any arrangement that reduces boundaries.
Planning for variable attendance
Hybrid patterns have made planning harder in a specific way that deserves naming. When attendance was near universal and constant, a plan could be sized against headcount. When attendance varies by day, by team, and by season, the plan must accommodate a distribution. Planning to the peak wastes space most of the week.
Planning to the average fails on the days that matter most, which are typically the days teams deliberately convene. Two implications follow. Purpose becomes more important than capacity, because people attending deliberately are attending to do something a home cannot support, usually collaboration or social connection, and the plan should be weighted toward those rather than toward rows of desks that replicate what they already have.
And flexibility has to be real rather than nominal, meaning furniture and services that genuinely allow reconfiguration rather than a claim of adaptability that nobody exercises.
The Indonesian dimension
Two regional factors influence this endeavor. The high commercial density and traffic conditions in Jakarta render attendance time-consuming, thereby elevating the expectations for workplace offerings to warrant the commute. A proposal that provides merely what an employee already possesses at home is struggling to compete with a two-hour journey.
Tropical climates introduce a planning implication that temperate recommendations overlook. Due to the increase in cooling load associated with higher occupant density and the fact that comfort in naturally ventilated environments is influenced by air circulation and external temperature rather than a predetermined setpoint (de Dear & Brager, 1998), decisions regarding density have more significant energy and comfort implications in this context compared to temperate climates.
Strategic arrangements that distribute occupancy and facilitate airflow yield superior results compared to those that concentrate it and rely on mechanical compensation. The magnitude of the opportunity is considerable. In 2025, Indonesia's creative economy engaged 27.4 million individuals, accounting for approximately 18.7 percent of the national labor force, with over half of its employees being under the age of 40 (Badan Pusat Statistik, 2025; Antara, 2025).
The limits
Two studies are two studies. The open-plan research examined two corporate headquarters, and while the method was rigorous and the effect large, replication across sectors and cultures remains limited.
Culture varies. Norms about overhearing, privacy, and hierarchy differ substantially between countries, and findings from North American corporate headquarters should not be transferred to Indonesian organizations without examination.
Planning cannot fix management. If an organization's problem is that people do not trust each other, no arrangement of furniture resolves it. Reviews of workplace change have consistently found that management practice and job design explain more variance in employee outcomes than physical setting alone (Parker, 2014).
Measurement can mislead. Utilization data captures presence, not value. A desk occupied by someone doing low-value work registers identically to one occupied by someone doing the opposite.
What the discipline requires
Workplace planning sits between design, behavioral research, and organizational reality.
It requires spatial planning skill, since the output is ultimately a plan. It requires data literacy, because the work begins and ends with measurement. It requires understanding of human behavior, particularly around privacy, attention, and interaction.
And it requires organizational sensitivity, because a workplace plan encodes assumptions about how an organization works and is frequently resisted for reasons that have nothing to do with the design. Studying Interior Design alongside Psychology, Business Administration, and Digital Media Design builds that combination, connecting spatial decisions to human response, to the cost and organizational arguments that justify them, and to the tools that measure use.
Teaching by practicing professionals matters because workplace norms have changed faster in recent years than in the preceding thirty (Raffles Jakarta, 2026c), and industrial attachment through the Centre of Professional Development places students in offices where use can be observed rather than assumed (Raffles Jakarta, 2026d).
The discipline earns its place through one demonstrated fact. A plausible assumption about how space affects behavior produced, at scale and for two decades, roughly the opposite of the intended result. Planning that begins with measurement rather than intuition is the correction, and it is the reason the work requires expertise rather than opinion.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do open-plan offices increase collaboration?
The evidence indicates the opposite. Two field studies at corporate headquarters transitioning to open layouts found face-to-face interaction decreased by approximately 70 percent, with an associated increase in email and instant messaging.
Researchers concluded that open architecture triggered a natural response to socially withdraw rather than prompting more interaction.
How was that measured?
Through wearable sociometric badges containing an infrared sensor recording who participants faced, microphones capturing speaking and listening without recording content, an accelerometer capturing movement, and a Bluetooth sensor capturing location, combined with direct data from email and instant messaging servers.
This avoided the self-reported activity logs earlier studies had relied on.
Why does removing walls reduce conversation?
Because conversation requires a degree of privacy. A discussion audible to twenty people is a different act from a private one, and people adjust accordingly. Research also shows employees become more reluctant to give negative feedback or raise sensitive issues in front of colleagues, pushing those exchanges into private channels.
What should workplace planning actually determine?
The mix of settings rather than the number of desks. Organizations perform activities with incompatible spatial requirements, including focused individual work, collaboration, confidential conversation, video calls, and social interaction.
A plan providing only one setting type forces all of them into a compromise that suits none.
Does activity-based working solve this?
It can, but the evidence is mixed and the failure modes are predictable. If the setting mix does not match actual work distribution, people settle for the wrong setting. If enclosed focus space is undersupplied, the result is an open plan with extra steps. And if introduced mainly to reduce floor area, occupants perceive it as a cost exercise.
How does hybrid working change planning?
It converts a headcount problem into a distribution problem. Planning to peak attendance wastes space most of the week, while planning to average fails on the days teams deliberately convene. It also shifts emphasis from capacity toward purpose, since people attending deliberately need what home cannot provide, usually collaboration and social connection.
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References
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