Open office floor plans are supposed to inspire creativity and collaboration. But does that work if employees actually would prefer working in an environment in which their co-workers can’t see their every move?
That’s a question worth considering after the release of the 2018 Workspace Survey from COMMERCIALCafe. The survey of more than 2,100 U.S. office workers found that employees overwhelmingly prefer offices that offer them greater privacy.
According to the survey, more than 42 percent of respondents said that their ideal workspace would be a private office. An additional 22.59 percent cited a home office as their ideal place in which to work.
The open plan office? Only 9.87 percent of respondents pointed to it as their ideal working environment. Co-working office space came in right behind, with only 9.44 percent citing it as a favored place to work.
Near the bottom were old-fashioned cubicles, which only 4.89 percent of respondents cited as their ideal working space.
However, not working in an ideal office doesn’t mean that most employees today hate their current office spaces. The COMMERCIALCafe study found that more than 50 percent of workers said they were happy with their current office layout, while 19 percent said they were neither happy nor unhappy with it.
Only 18 percent of respondents said they were unhappy with their current work environment.
Employers needn’t worry too much that workers will quit over their office space. COMMERCIALCafe found that 60 percent of respondents said they definitely wouldn’t quite their jobs because of their office space layout and 30 percent said they probably wouldn’t quit. Only 6 percent said they might quit because of their work environment.
