2023-12-15 06:00:03
Open spaces – or open-plan offices, in French – are supposed to improve productivity through better communication between employees, and reduce real estate costs through more rational layout of spaces. The other side of the coin is that, since their emergence in France in the 1990s, they have been accused of degrading the quality of professional life.
The management of research, studies and statistics of the Ministry of Labor (Dares), which lists 3.2 million French employees working in this type of arrangement in 2019, or 13% of the total, is full of that Sens. The institution has just published a section, devoted to open spaces, from its three-year study on working conditions, which covered 7,306 employees in office jobs. Among them, two out of five are concerned with open-plan offices. It appears that the conditions for exercising this mode of work remain “generally less good” than those of employees working in traditional offices, even though the differences are often minimal.
Thus, employees in open space are subject to greater work intensity and more constraints, 39% of them (compared to 33% in traditional offices) being subject to at least three rhythm constraints out of eight (dependence immediate response to the work of one or more colleagues, production standards or deadlines to be met in one hour or one day at most, computerized control or monitoring, etc.). Fewer of them feel capable (61%, compared to 70% of their counterparts in traditional offices) and want (46%, compared to 57%) to do the same work until retirement, and more numerous have declared sick leave (excluding maternity leave) during the last twelve months preceding the survey (34%, compared to 27%).
“Higher” psychosocial risks
“This phenomenon could be explained (…) by greater exposure to noise and viruses in open space and by higher psychosocial risks, (…) linked for example to lack of autonomy », underline Tiphaine Do and Audrey-Rose Schneider, authors of the study. These black spots are barely offset by the fact that open-plan employees work more often in less dilapidated premises and benefit, thanks to physical proximity, from better support from their colleagues (92%, compared to 86% in classic office).
Should we, then, bury open space before it kills us, as stated in a book published in 2008 (L’open space m’a tuer, by Thomas Zuber and Alexandre des Isnards, Pocket Book)? It would be a quick job. First of all, we must not confuse correlation with causality: certain reasons for dissatisfaction mentioned in the study clearly have less to do with open spaces than with the nature of the professions carried out there and over-represented there.
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