# Why Open-Plan Offices Lost Their Appeal

IELTS Academic Reading - 13 questions - 20 minutes - Matching headings, Multiple choice (choose more than one), Summary completion

Source: Written by Testmigo.

## The passage

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on the passage below.

**A** In the spring of 2015, Facebook began moving about 2,800 of its engineers into a new building in Menlo Park, California, designed by the architect Frank Gehry. Mark Zuckerberg described it as the largest open floor plan in the world: a single room big enough for thousands of people. To many, this seemed the natural shape of a modern business. Yet the open office was not invented by technology firms, and by the time Facebook unveiled its showpiece, researchers had begun to ask whether the layout actually delivered what its supporters promised.

**B** The idea can be traced back to West Germany in the late 1950s. In 1958 two brothers, Eberhard and Wolfgang Schnelle, set up a space-planning consultancy outside Hamburg that became known as the Quickborner Team. They disliked the rigid rows of desks of scientific management, and the strict ranking of staff that those rows expressed. Instead, they studied how paperwork and conversation really travelled through an organisation and positioned each person according to whom they needed to deal with. The result was called Bürolandschaft, or 'office landscape'. Desks were scattered at irregular angles across one large floor, managers sat among their teams, and curved screens and large potted plants provided a little visual separation. The publisher Bertelsmann was the brothers' first major client, and the approach soon spread to Sweden and across the English Channel and the Atlantic.

**C** In the United States, Robert Propst of the furniture maker Herman Miller had a different answer. He believed that office employees needed contact with colleagues but also some control over their own surroundings. His Action Office, designed with George Nelson and launched in 1964, offered standing desks, height-adjustable shelving and movable partitions, with corners set at 120-degree angles to encourage people to exchange information. Yet sales were disappointing. The system was costly to manufacture, and many managers were uneasy about how porous the boundaries around their staff would become.

**D** Propst pared the design down, and Action Office II, which reached the market in 1968, achieved far greater commercial success. It consisted of free-standing panels that could be joined into work areas. Customers, however, were less interested in Propst's vision than in their budgets. Changes to the American tax code in the early 1960s had already allowed companies to write off office furnishings as depreciating assets, favouring light panels over heavy oak desks. Later, as the number of office workers grew in the 1980s and 1990s, firms found that joining panels at 90 degrees squeezed far more people onto a floor than Propst's wider angles. Row upon row of identical boxes followed. Propst himself later complained that some organisations built tiny cubicles and simply stuffed people into them.

**E** Many employers eventually took the panels away altogether, hoping that fewer walls would bring more collaboration. In 2013, Jungsoo Kim and Richard de Dear of the University of Sydney analysed responses from more than 42,000 office workers in 303 buildings, held in a University of California, Berkeley database. Open-plan occupants expressed strong dissatisfaction with sound privacy, and those whose desks had partial partitions were even less content on this point. Any gain in ease of interaction did not offset the noise and lack of privacy. In fact, people with private offices tended to be more satisfied with ease of interaction than those in open-plan space. The authors concluded that their results flatly contradicted the accepted industry view that open layouts improve communication.

**F** Surveys, though, record what people feel rather than what they do. In 2018, Ethan Bernstein of Harvard Business School and Stephen Turban of Harvard University measured behaviour directly at two large multinational companies that were converting their offices to open plan. In the first study, 52 employees wore sociometric badges, devices with microphones and infrared sensors that register face-to-face conversation. The badges were worn for three weeks before the redesign and for three weeks a few months afterwards, while the researchers also gathered email and instant-messaging records. Following the move, time spent in face-to-face interaction fell by 72 per cent, while emails rose by 56 per cent and instant messages by 67 per cent. A second study, involving 100 employees, found a similar drop of around 70 per cent. Executives at the first company also reported that productivity had declined. The authors suggest that people surrounded by colleagues tend to withdraw socially and turn to their screens instead.

**G** A different answer had emerged in the Netherlands during the 1990s. The Dutch consultant Erik Veldhoen argued that because people carry out a variety of activities in a working day, they need a variety of settings rather than one fixed desk. Under activity-based working, which the insurer Interpolis was among the first to adopt, nobody owns a desk; instead, staff move between enclosed rooms for concentration, open areas for team discussion and other spaces suited to particular tasks. The approach has drawn its own complaints, including shortages of desks and difficulty finding colleagues. The pandemic then pushed the same logic further. According to the Office for National Statistics, 28 per cent of working adults in Great Britain were dividing their working week between home and a workplace by the autumn of 2024. For employees like these, the debate is no longer about whether walls should come down, but about what each part of the office is for.

## Questions

### Questions 14-20: Matching headings

The passage has seven paragraphs, A-G. Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings.

- **i** Disagreement among researchers about the evidence
- **ii** Recording behaviour rather than opinions
- **iii** A promising product that few companies bought
- **iv** Arranging desks to follow the movement of information
- **v** The first technology company to remove its walls
- **vi** Large-scale opinions that challenge a popular belief
- **vii** Matching spaces to the work being done
- **viii** Government rules that required open offices
- **ix** A recent landmark built on an older idea
- **x** How commercial pressures reshaped a flexible design

14. Paragraph A

15. Paragraph B

16. Paragraph C

17. Paragraph D

18. Paragraph E

19. Paragraph F

20. Paragraph G

### Questions 21-22: Multiple choice (choose more than one)

Choose TWO letters, A-E. Which TWO factors does the writer mention as reasons why Action Office II developed into rows of cubicles?

- **A** Office workers asked for more privacy.
- **B** Furniture could be treated as a depreciating asset for tax purposes.
- **C** Propst advised companies to use one standard arrangement.
- **D** Square corners allowed more staff to fit into the same space.
- **E** Surveys showed that employees disliked open offices.

### Questions 23-26: Summary completion

Complete the summary below. Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Research on open-plan offices
An analysis of survey data from tens of thousands of workers found that open-plan occupants gained little in ease of interaction. Dissatisfaction with **(23)** _____ was greatest among people whose desks had partial partitions. A later project measured behaviour instead: employees wore **(24)** _____ that detected face-to-face conversations, and the researchers also examined records of email and **(25)** _____. After the move to open plan, conversations in person fell sharply, and senior staff at one company believed that **(26)** _____ had also gone down.

[Practice online with a timer and instant marking](https://testmigo.com/ielts/reading/why-open-plan-offices-lost-their-appeal) - [Answers and explanations](https://testmigo.com/ielts/reading/why-open-plan-offices-lost-their-appeal/answers)