How Office Workers can make Open Floor Plans more Productive

Hermione D. Carsten, PMP

8 years ago

Part 2 of 3

Do you love open floor plans? Hate them? Either way, there are things you can do to maximize your productivity and the productivity of the people around you.

Introverts often quickly understand the need for guides to surviving an open floor plan, like this one.

What if you love open floor plan and feel just as (or more) productive than you would in a quiet office to yourself? What if you’re an extrovert and get more energy from having other people around? Is there anything useful for you here?

Yes, and here’s why:

Camaraderie feels like productivity.
While extroverts perform better with louder background noise than introverts (study by Russell Geen, mentioned in Quiet by Susan Cain), we all have limits on how much distraction we can handle before it becomes difficult to focus.
Supporting your coworkers. I’ve learned that my experience in the moment can be very different from other people in the same environment, depending on their core personality and what they’re trying to achieve.

So, what can you do? Here’s some ideas:

Noise

Noise cancelling headphones, the more obvious the better. This can help be a cue that you need to focus. While this alone wasn’t enough in my second open floor experience, it did help.
Natural and unpredictable sounds are better for concentration. Music you like is good for routine tasks where you don’t need to think, and classical music may help complex thought. Nature sounds like rain, wind, ocean, or birds, or random sounds that aren’t music like color noise and binaural beats can be soothing without being distracting. I often use these for additional concentration even when I have a quiet office to myself. Some of my favorite focus noises are combinations of brown noise, binaural beats, and rain sounds. There’s lots of YouTube videos with hours of different combinations of sounds.
Find the office rhythm and know your triggers. Plan around the times of day/week when the office is less distracting.

Privacy/visual distractions

Work from home when you can, if you have a quite space with no distractions.
Other private spaces that you can escape to – café, library, nook, focus rooms, phone rooms and conference rooms, possibly in a different area or building from your normal workspace where you’re unlikely to run into people you know. Find something where you can use it for several hours. I try for at least two hours.
Computer screen filter for your computer screens.
The feng shui command position concept provides privacy and reduces startling distractions by giving you warning when people walk over

- See if you can get movable furniture (not fixed in a system) and set it up so you face where most of the traffic is, or face where people walk up to you. If you need a standing or sit-/stand desk for ergonomic reasons, that’s more likely to be somewhat movable.
- Mirror on the desk so you can see people coming.
- Ask for a corner or a wall space.

Tall plants or screens. Real or fake plants can go on the desk and/or flor. You can also create your own cube with Room dividers. Amazon sells folding screens in various prices, and a few stands for both screens and curtains, like this. For some sound baffling, go for things that are soft and thick, or have lots of edges facing different directions, like Sempervivum plants, corduroy or velvet.
Free standing shelves.
High back chair. Do booths in a restaurant feel sheltered? Same idea.
Coat rack with a big coat on it.
From my own experience – search for ‘public’ nooks that are quiet. Cafeterias are often good for this outside normal meal hours.
If there isn’t a quiet place, a noisy place that’s impersonal can still help provide privacy like a cafeteria where you don’t know anyone, or coffee shop.
Find private spaces for collaboration and deeper conversation. Private space improves collaboration because conversations where uninvolved people are listening tend to stay superficial.

Getting Sick

Wash hands well especially before touching your face.
Keep antibacterial wipes or gel nearby to use on surfaces around you and your hands. They make some that are gentler on skin these days.
Take sick days when you’re not feeling well.
Cover coughs and sneezes (use upper sleeve or elbow if you don’t have a tissue handy).

Social/communication

Office rules – have a meeting with the people around you and learn together what everyone finds distracting, and how people want to handle focus vs. social time. Explain what works for you, ask the quiet people to contribute. People won’t always stick to the rules, but if they’re discussed and created together it will raise awareness.
Ask people to check your status, then IM you before coming over, even if they sit close.
Create a signal to let others know you’re concentrating. Tell everyone what it is. Signs can work. Headphones alone usually don’t quite tip people off because everyone wears them all the time. An eye-catching toy that changes location to a prominent spot can be a cue. A few companies make desk lights that show your IM status live like https://www.embrava.com/collections/all and https://www.busylight.com/en_us/.
Spend some time being social. You (and others) may find it easier to have “do not disturb time” when there’s a little social time too.
Set specific consistent times of day/week when you’re available and not. Consistency takes a lot of the thought and guesswork out of the day.

Stress reduction

Introverts take breaks by yourself. Since the office is full of social stimulation, find time to be alone during the day.
Extroverts spend time being social (see above, also helps make ‘room’ for focus time).
Go for a walk – Fresh air and movement helps. If getting outside isn’t reasonable, even walking around the building helps.
Looking at plants can reduce stress. (Linking to Psychology Today as the original Miller-McCune article: Nature is Good link is broken).
Any stress reduction technique that works for you, like meditation, breathing exercises or power stances. One of my favorite quick exercises is to take three deep, conscious breaths, and smile (from the Steam Dreamers of Inverness radio plays).
A few companies have prayer/meditation rooms for some quiet time. This can be a good option on days when the weather’s bad.

Focus

Most of my focus tips come from Cal Newport’s book Deep Work. I found this a great resource of ideas and techniques for improving focus and compressed productivity. These are just a few:

Several smart routines and rituals suiting different styles and ways of life that reduce the willpower and effort needed to maintain deep focused work. Through lines include:
- Ritualize – plan where, how, and how long in advance.
- Accountability – measure your performance to your plan. Keep it simple.
- Comfort – include the things you need to be ready to focus into your ritual – coffee, exercise, or nutrition – whatever removes distractions and helps you think.
- Avoid distractions

- - “Embrace Boredom….To succeed with deep work you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distracting stimuli.” Practice accepting moments of boredom. Turn your schedule around. “Don’t take breaks from distraction. Instead, take breaks from focus.”
  - Quit social media. Time without internet and phones as entertainment supports the point above and gives more time for alternatives that provide a deeper level of rest and rejuvenation.
  - “Drain the Shallows…. Treat shallow work with suspicion because its damage is often vastly underestimated and its importance vastly overestimated.” A friend talks about shallow work as the “work you do to not get fired” where deep work is “the work you do that advances your career”. It’s important not to get fired, but if we overbalance to shallow work we never have time to excel or distinguish ourselves with results that really make a difference.
  - “Become hard to reach”

Downtime
- Preserve downtime and sleep at the end of the day. After a long day of distractions it can feel like we didn’t get enough done and tempting to put in a few more hours to catch up. However, Newport points out, “the work that evening downtime replaces is usually not that important.” When I get tired at the end of the day my judgment on priority starts to slip and I spend time on tasks I would never consider urgent when rested. This turns into a cycle of spending more hours, less recovery time and less time on the work that really matters.
- Quality downtime recharges the energy we need for deep work. We only have 1-4 hours capacity for deep work per day according to a 1993 Anders Ericsson paper Newport cites on practicing for expert level performance. Build that time in the workday and use evenings to fully unplug, rest and recharge.
- Downtime around nature increases focus as well as reduces stress (above). Newport cites a 2008 paper in Psychological Science that gave two groups a concentration-sapping task. The group that took a walk through a wooded path performed 20% better than the group that took a walk through busy city streets.

Practice productive meditation. “The goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which you’re occupied physically but not mentally—walking, jogging, driving, showering—and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem.” Using walking time this way provides a powerful 3-in-1 life hack. Stack productive focus time, stress reduction (mentioned above) plus improved health in the same time.

Interruptions are sometimes inevitable. My last tip comes from both Deep Work and from a University of Washington article. The article recommends writing ready-to-resume plan before devoting attention to a new task. This produces better results on the interrupting task. Deep Work mentions doing a similar “shutdown ritual” at the end of the day. Rather than creating a ready-to-resume plan for every unfinished task, Newport suggests capturing them in a common list and reviewing them before planning the next day. This ensures you don’t have to put any more energy into thinking about it, and nothing will be forgotten.