“In many cases, open offices are still the cheapest way to fit the most people into a given area with the least discomfort.” But the open office has already persisted through multiple recessions and aesthetic shifts, and if history is any guide, it will outlast this one too. The open office now feels symbolic of two bygone eras-a booming economy, and a world that could afford to think less about viral spread than many other concerns. But the bottom was bound to fall out of an economy that competed for young employees with snacks rather than wage increases. These changes often come alongside expanded amenities or updated design, so they don’t seem so dire. By Ronda Churchill/Bloomberg/Getty Images.
The couture department of Zappos in Nevada, 2010. Rumors abound that tech companies are buying up plexiglass to use as barriers in open spaces, and the remote work so many employees have spent the last two months practicing has never been as attractive. But it’s a certain type of open office, the panopticon-like floors where workers are practically forced to violate social distancing, drawing the most reflexive disgust. As states begin to contemplate lifting stay-at-home orders months into the pandemic, the researchers’ observations about office life have never been more relevant. And that was before “breathing room” came to be deployed literally in American life. Since the 1980s, survey data has shown that workers find the open office to be stressful, but a generational crisis is turning that unease into revulsion.
“Contamination can be spread throughout the workplace when office workers heat up lunch, make coffee, or simply type on their keyboards.” “People are aware of the risk of germs in the restroom, but areas like break rooms have not received the same degree of attention,” said microbiologist Charles Gerba, who aided the study, in 2012. By the end of the day, every surface they tested had some trace of the virus, from the coffee pots to bathrooms, other handles, and the break room. Within four hours, over 50% of the commonly touched surfaces had been contaminated. Viral spread, on the other hand, is pretty straightforward. Open offices, introduced in the 1960s, were in theory intended to increase hard-to-quantify things like collaboration and creativity. The team placed a nonpathogenic virus on the door to an open office, a floor with central seating-in this case partly divided by cubicles and individual offices-with 80 employees. About 10 years ago, a team of researchers in Arizona conducted a study to see how fast a virus can spread inside an average workspace.
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