By Laurent Taskin, Michaël Parmentier, and Florence Stinglhamber
November 2019
The study was performed as a result of other research studies coming back without the positive results, they expected for flex offices or open office concepts. Other studies on open-plan and flex-offices did not reach the expectations of meeting employee productivity, well-being, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and retention. Therefore, they conducted a quantitative survey with 534 employees working in various office designs in Belgium, to see if the feeling of de-humanization may explain the negative side effects. Along with the survey they had 12 semi-structured interviews with the respondents to further analyze how they experienced their office design. When it comes to de-humanization there are said to be two forms:
Animalistic: when characteristics that differentiate humans from animals are denied
Mechanistic: where individuals are viewed as non-human objects that do not possess characteristics that define human nature
While both occur in the office, mechanistic is more likely to be found in an organizational setting. This is likely due to employees feeling like a tool or robot to the company. With modernization and technological advances staff can feel like they are just being used like these non-human alternatives.
Their subjects were all white-collar workers in administrative, professional, or managerial work. It was a 40-60 split of women to men with an average age of 47 years. Of the 534 participants, 17.4% worked in cell offices, 32.8% in open-plan offices and 49.8% in flex offices. The survey consisted of statements with scales ranging from 1-7 with 1 meaning either strongly disagree or never and 7 indicating strongly agree or always. Statements were taken from each of the following categories:
Organizational de-humanization (ex. My organization considers me as a number)
Psychological strains (ex. At work, I feel frustrated)
Job Satisfaction (ex. I am very satisfied with my current job)
Affective commitment (ex the organization has a great deal of personal meaning for me)
In-role performance (ex. I fulfill responsibilities specified in my job description)
Extra-role performance (ex. I look for a way to make my organization more successful)
Turnover intentions (ex. I intend to leave my organization in the near future)
They found that amongst the 3 office designs (cell, open office and flex office), each comes with different levels of de-humanization which in turn affects job satisfaction, organizational commitment, performance, and psychological strains on different levels as well. The findings of this study support their hypothesis, indicating that cell offices prompt the lowest level of de-humanization, while flex-offices prompt the highest. They do mention that their limitation on these results is that most of the flex-office workers were from one organization and results could therefore be based on different variables.
While this study was conducted on administrative, managerial and professional workers, the industries were quite broad from Finance to Mining. So I can see many businesses being able to adopt this analysis. As always it is important to know the kind of work being done, and whether it is important to be more collaborative or if the work is more individual and requires concentration. I don't think many companies think about the de-humanizing aspect which is highlighted in this study, therefore giving this study a unique perspective that I believe could be used in the business world. Most of us are so consumed by numbers that we need to go back and look after our staff and make sure they don't feel like just like another number.
I find it interesting that there are multiple studies that are finding quite a few negatives to flex-offices and open-office concepts. A lot of the blogs and trends I found all talk about the positives of those designs. I think it's important to see both the pros and cons of a design and decide what is best for the type of work you are doing. That seems to be the biggest takeaway from this study - as each level has some level of de-humanization, you must consider the type of work being done and which fits best with your organization.
Taskin, L., Parmentier, M., & Stinglhamber, F. (2019). The dark side of office designs: towards de‐humanization. New Technology, Work & Employment, 34(3), 262–284. https://doi-org.athena.rrc.mb.ca:2047/10.1111/ntwe.12150
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