Ethan Bernstein
Organisational behaviour researcher who measured what open-plan offices do to conversation instead of asking people about it.
Who they are
Bernstein works at Harvard Business School on transparency and observation at work. With Stephen Turban he instrumented two corporate headquarters moving to open-plan floors, using wearable devices and the firms' own email and instant messaging servers, before and after.
It was the first study to measure both kinds of interaction across such a change, which is remarkable given how many organisations have made the change.
Key papers
Bernstein, E. S., & Turban, S. (2018). The impact of the open workspace on human collaboration. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 373(1753), 20170239.
Key ideas
Face-to-face interaction decreased significantly, by approximately seventy per cent in both cases, with an associated increase in electronic interaction.
The authors read this as a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact over email and instant messaging instead.
The instrument detects proximity and speech activity rather than conversation, a limit the paper is careful about and its coverage was not.
Concepts on this site
Sources
- doi:10.1098/rstb.2017.0239