-- Intro --
Chris Moriarty
Hello and welcome to Workplace Geeks, the podcast that delves dissects and sifts through the world's leading workplace research and talks to the amazing people behind it. I'm Chris Moriarty. And I'm Ian Ellison. And we are about your humble guides on this voyage of discovery as we unpick the nuances of workplace performance, one study at a time. And today, today, we have an absolute banger of a study. In fact, two studies, and let me tell you this, it might change everything you thought you knew about the open plan office, in fact, open plan environments in general, there's a little teaser for you. But before that, some points of admin, we are still conducting our hunts for Ben Waber at humanised now I could completely email him I know this, but I'm determined to use the podcast instead, why? A it will test the power of our community reach and be it makes for a nice bit of content at the start of each episode as I update you on our progress.
So, if you know Ben sent him a message, the Workplace Geeks are looking for him. I realised that sounds quite threatening, we want to be very nice to him, we just want to we just want to have a chat with him. Okay, so just before we set alarm bells ringing. And also, some of you may have seen that we have some merch, the Workplace Geeks, notepads have arrived, and we'll be dishing them out. At the three events. We're at this month workplace trends in London, our own event the very next day, and the workplace event in Birmingham the week after all of which we'll link to in the show notes. And finally, it's our regular reminder to get in touch with us about your thoughts about each episode, our own digital reflection section. Or maybe you want to suggest a guest as long as they meet the five Workplace Geeks commandments where you just want to say hi. So that can be done on LinkedIn. Just search for Workplace Geeks using the #workplacegeeks that's #workplacegeeks, dropping us an email on hello@workplacegeeks.org or signing up to our newsletter for which all of the information is on our website at Workplace Geeks.org. So that is the admin done. Ian, why don't you tell us a bit more about today's guest.
Ian Ellison
So today, Chris, we've got another doctor of workplace that we've known for quite a while Dr. Kerstin Sailer. She's a professor in the sociology of Architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London. I would say Kerstin’s very much a sort of modern academic if there is such thing, by which I mean she's super engaged and vocal on the socials, not just about architecture, space syntax and design, but also about long COVID something which is very, very relevant to Kerstin. So, Kerstin is talking to us about two papers today. The first one's got bit of a catchy title, differential perceptions of teamwork focused work and perceived productivity as an effect of desk characteristics within a workplace layout. And that's the lead author there is Kerstin, but also with Petrus Koutsolampros and Rosie Pachilova.
And the second paper is providing care quality by design a new measure to assess hospital ward layouts, which is by Rosie Pachilova, and Kerstin Sailer. So, we've got two papers about workspace design and layout from two very different workplace environments. I think that's really important to point out now because the reasons why we get into this during the conversation. So, Chris, there's gonna be links to both papers in the show notes for anybody that wants to read more deeply. It's worth saying it's a chunky episode, right? But think of it as two for the price of one with some really powerful insights and take away to boot. So, let us know what you think folks
Chris Moriarty
Wonderful stuff. And folks, we have another special guest joining us for the reflection section. Good workplace chum of ours and podcasts. Super fan Simon Iatrou of Magenta Associates. So, listen out for his dulcet tones after the interview. And with that out of the way. Let's go and speak to Kerstin.
-- Interview --
Chris Moriarty
Kerstin, welcome to the Workplace Geeks podcast. Before we start talking about two papers, we've got two papers to talk about today. Before we dive into those, just tell us a bit about your work. And where you do that work.
Kerstin Sailer
I'm an architect by training and very early on, I have developed an interest in the social aspects of buildings, and what buildings do to people. I’ve approached the topic from various angles as an end user of office spaces as a PhD student as an academic as a consultant. But right now, I do this work as a professor in the sociology of Architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture and that's at UCL University College London. And I'm also a co-founder of brainy birds, which is a think tank to advance scientific thinking and workplace design.
Ian Ellison
So, a professor of sociology in architecture are there many of those are you the only one?
Kerstin Sailer
Not that many interestingly, it's much more typical in Germany. So, there's a fair few professors in the sociology of architecture in Germany. But other than that, I think it's a field in the rising, bringing together the sociology lens and the architecture perspective.
Chris Moriarty
So, we've talked about sociology on the podcast before, outright its own merits, but just explain to us briefly what the sociology of architecture actually means for someone who knows the two words in isolation, but maybe hasn't seen them joined together before.
Kerstin Sailer
So sociology is the study of people and how they interact, and how they interact on a small scale to people in small groups in bigger groups, across different kinds of relationships, like kinship, or friendships, or colleagues, or teamwork. So, all of those kinds of things within certain nested contexts, at home, religious at work, etc. But then also taking it to the bigger scale of society, how does society work? And how does society function? If you take that together with architecture, what I'm interested in is what is the effect of the spatial layout or spatial design of buildings in particular, on how people now interact, relate to others meet others, form groups, how it helps organisations to prosper and function, etcetera. So, you could bring those two together on very different levels?
Ian Ellison
Am I right in saying that there are some key concepts which underpin your work, which have been around for a few decades now, I'm talking about space syntax in particular, but I know that you link that quite often to social network analysis, is that would you say that's kind of like a foundation stone for the stuff that you do? Kerstin
Kerstin Sailer
At the Bartlett School of Architecture, I'm part of the space syntax Laboratory, which is a group of colleagues who work particularly with space syntax, in all of its, different shapes and forms across different scales. I'm one of the few people in there who look at buildings in particular, so a lot of my colleagues look at the urban context, and how you can apply space syntax to the urban context.
And space syntax, just a very brief introduction to that is the idea that you look at space as a network. So rather than looking at the qualities of a particular building, or room as in the colour, the style, the aesthetics, the construction, etcetera, you look at it from the perspective of how does the room that I'm sitting in, connect to other rooms in the building? And how can we build that into a network, and then we can study that with means of graph theory. So, it gets quite quantitative and quite mathematical.
Ian Ellison
When you say how rooms connect to other rooms, what you're fundamentally thinking about is the degree of interconnectedness of buildings, are they very interconnected, are the very open, are they very sort of labyrinthine, more closed, for example, and because of the degree of interconnectedness, the impact that that has upon people and the sociological interactions between people. So, a very visual, and very quantified metric for looking at how buildings affect people's interactions, basically
Kerstin Sailer
We would look at, for example, if you enter a building, what can you see from where you stand? How much does the building reveal of itself? Immediately upon entering? Can you see the main circulation? Does the building guide you by its layout to where you'd need to go? And is it therefore intuitively available to you as an individual person? Or does the building reveal nothing of itself, and for example, you rely on signage and other means of navigating that building.
And likewise, if a building is open, and you step in, and you see, for example, in office, there's the cafe right next to it. And you can see an open staircase, it gives you all sorts of opportunities, or affordances, to connect with other people. And that's where then the sociological aspect comes in, to kind of think about, what does the building provide in terms of the physical fabric of seeing and going, how you flow through the building and what you see on the way.
Ian Ellison
So that all makes sense. And one of the really distinctive things about space syntax is you come up with these visuals, which are the analyses that you run, end up looking like almost like heat maps for buildings. So, you can see hotspots of interconnectedness of cold spots of isolatedness. And this is relevant to the papers we're getting to because you use these, and you can sort of see them in the findings. But this is a way for you to visually understand from a data perspective, how open or closed a building is, how interconnected or not
Kerstin Sailer
And those visualisations are a big strength of the methodology because it's very easy to communicate with laypeople and show them their building and a lot of people who've never seen the method If you have no idea about the mathematics behind it, would look at this and intuitively get and see, oh, oh, yeah, I can see the main circulation, I can see that I'm sitting in a very busy spot, etc. So, it's a great visualisation technique, and there will be a nice challenge to talk about. But in a medium that doesn't allow for visuals
Ian Ellison
I remember somebody ran space syntax on an Apple shop. And because of the location of the Genius Bar at the back of the shop, it actually mirrors are you ready for this? Chris? It mirrors a church altar. So, the visual demonstration of Apple stores as a religious experience can be confirmed by space syntax.
Chris Moriarty
That's incredible. So that leads us nicely into the first of two papers that we want to talk about. And the first one is about a piece of research that you've done. And the article is titled, differential perceptions of teamwork focused work, and perceived productivity as an effect of desk characteristics within a workplace layout. So, in simple terms, if you could tell us what the researcher is looking at, and just give us a bit of background about how this came about, before we dive into the, into the specifics
Kerstin Sailer
So, this was a study on a corporate office in the technology industry, we're not telling the company here. So, you'd have to take a guess
Chris Moriarty
Go on, dare you, tell us who it is.
Kerstin Sailer
So, I've signed interesting confidentiality agreements. But it is a large technology company with their headquarters in London, what's the background to the study was the realisation that open plan is not really equal to open plan. So how open plan is discussed in the literature is often as if it was just one category, as if you could label something as open plan. And then it would be immediately clear how that would look. And from a point of view of looking at configuration and the details of how a layout works, that's surely not the case. For listeners, if you think about a small open plan with 20 people, and very wide open, that's very different to a floor plate with 100. People with lots of you know, kind of higher furniture, or cubicles. Or if you sit an investment bank, and you see 1000 colleagues on your trading floor environment, very, very different from a sociological point of view, and help people behave in those kinds of places. So those kind of inconsistencies and contradictions in the existing research on open plan was one of the starting points.
And open plan gets a lot of bashing in the media around open plan is from hell. And you know, this is the worst thing ever. And a lot of research backs that, but not all research. So, if you look at the question like is open plan, good or not, you can pretty much find every single kind of opinion that you'd want support it. So, we established that what do you need to do is to look at office layouts in a more fine-grained way. Look at all of those details. And the key concern of the paper was, do the perceptions of staff differ depending on where they sit in an office? So, where you sit at your desk, and we know that not every desk location is made equal? What does that do to how your work and how you perceive the work that you do?
Ian Ellison
You said it was from hell, I think you'll find it was divided by Satan in the deepest cabins of health according to certain authors, your kind of going look, we need to look at this with a bit more rigor, and with a bit more granularity. And so, your study actually started by saying there are almost different types of seating here seating in different places, which affords different things talking about the affordances, you mentioned in your introduction. And that was the basis for how you went about doing it. So, do you want to pick up the threads from there, Kerstin
Kerstin Sailer
What we looked at in a little bit more detail, speaking about those affordances is, first of all, quite generically, you know, to understand the real-life experience of a workplace, in the user, an employee in that space. Because if you have assigned seating, and that was the case, in that study, it was pre-pandemic, by the way. So, you had an assigned desk, you got that desk because you were a member of that particular team.
So, you start your new role, you get assigned a desk and this is where you to be sitting. So, you don't have a choice of you know, do you sit in this corner? Do you sit on that corner? Am I on this floor? Am I on that floor? If you have that kind of desk location, we would look at the view shed. So, what do you see if you sit at your desk? So, what's in front of you? And how many other desks can you see as a kind of metric of how busy is it actually? And how visible are you to your colleagues, but also, how much do they see you. So, it's a kind of seeing and being seen that we were interested in
Ian Ellison
How do you articulate field of view and degree of what you can see in being seen, what's the analysis?
Kerstin Sailer
It's called an isovist. So, an isovist is, if you imagine you're sitting somewhere, and you're looking ahead of you in a 170-degree view shed. So that includes your peripheral vision, but everything that's ahead of you, and an isovist, this is the kind of spiky figure that you could draw on the floor plan, seeing how far your view extends until it hits a wall or something that is, you know, eye level height, so whatever you can see from there, and then you can also construct that same isovist as a 360 degree view shed.
So, imagine, you would turn on the spot in your swivel chair. And think about, you know, how far does my vision now extend? What are the things that you can then see, so this is the basis of a visibility graph analysis, which is one of the common tools of building analysis in space syntax? But there's other techniques as well, that would, for example, look more at flows of movement, and would then be kind of based on axial lines of where you would walk, whereas this one is based on vision, and on what you can see, and how big that area is, or how many desks in our case you have in that area
Chris Moriarty
When I looked at it, and when I was reading it, and actually, even when you're just describing it, it kind of felt like, imagine, people have got light bulbs for eyes, like in that Bonnie Tyler video. And you're basically mapping where the light goes. And it was just really interesting for me to see on the spatial metrics, the different things that you're measuring that you know that we're essentially going to be the variables on which you tested some of the things that you're going to ask. So just talk us talk to us a little bit about how they become these, and it's five in this paper, I don't know if that's, that's the typical five, if there's more, or there's different ones, but just those spatial metrics and why they're so important
Kerstin Sailer
That kind of standard metric that space syntax would use would be area of a nice serviced, we test it out area. But we've actually then more interested in the numbers of desks. And those two were highly correlated, obviously. But we were more interested in the numbers of desks as a kind of metric of how many people could potentially be disrupting you. So that was one thing we were interested in. So how big is your view shed in terms of how many desks can you count from where you sit, because potentially at every desk will be a human that desks obviously, that disrupt you, it's the humans that sit at that desk. So those two are the 170 degree, numbers of desks, the 360-degree numbers of desks, so those two, and then we also looked at what we called control. So, control is this idea whether you are facing the room.
So, imagine you are in a sea of desks, but you're actually right next to the back wall, and you have a seat that is facing the room, you might be seeing lots of people, but there's no one in your back, no one could walk behind, you could approach you from behind. Now, in most offices, you have desks arranged as these rows, so the person sitting opposite, you will have everyone almost everyone in their back, and will have very few people in front of them. Theoretically, satisfaction could go either way. You know, you could argue that if you see lots of people, it could be a big visual distraction, particularly for someone who might be neurodiverse, or who finds it difficult to concentrate. Whereas facing away from the room could be preferable. But then you have this kind of predator creeping up behind you kind of problem. So, people actually don't like having stuff going on behind their backs. So, we calculated the ratio of how much it is in front of you, versus how much is in your back. And if that ratio is close to one, it means you have a lot of control.
Ian Ellison
That's really interesting. You know, I've been a facilities manager in the past, I've dealt with big call centres, big open plan offices, small selling offices, you know, lots of different workplaces, and workspaces within them. And they always seem to be seats, which people naturally prefer. And sometimes it's linked to the type of team or sometimes it's linked to the type of personality preferences and whatnot. But I would say that generally, desks near windows tend to be favoured and selected first in a free seating hot desking type way. I would say the seats where you are in a corner looking out or you are back to a wall so that you can see out, but you don't feel exposed from behind.
There are a few so I have, from my experience hunches I have for where people might prefer to be. So, what's the link between my sort of initial ideas of what might be happening here to what you actually found.
Kerstin Sailer
I think there's interesting intuitions that people have, you can kind of observe, oh, the window seat, etcetera, seem to type, whether it's by a window next to a corridor, or mid row was something we tested as well didn't show much. So, the preference of the window seat was not something that we could confirm. Whereas some of the other kind of hunches about, you know what you said about sitting in the corner, or having the wall behind you, rather than in front of you. That was definitely confirmed in the paper and in the results. So, there's various levels of what is preferable. As I said, some findings were rather surprising. And we're going against what you would find in previously reported literature's, but what was not so surprising, as we would expect, is if you face the room, so if you have people in front of you, rather than in your back, you would rate your workplace much more positively, that factor of control. If you're facing the room, you feel like you're more in control, and the bigger size is something that you can cope with. So, then you would rate the factors more positively, if you have more control.
The other thing is that if you're in a larger area, the more desks you can see from where you sit, the less likely you are to rate your workplace as supportive of concentration and productive work. So that's as expected, if there's lots and lots of other people, the rate and level of distraction and noise and being disrupted, that can go up. But what we were surprised by was that other factors on teamwork, on sharing information with others, and on Team identity and cohesion was also rated negative, if you weren't in a large room, being in a large space in our study did not only harm productive work and concentrated work, but also that kind of feeling of being part of a team, collaborating with others and sharing with others. And it's quite an interesting finding in that kind of trend. We've seen particularly in technology companies, when it comes to floorplate size, as a kind of bigger, better, faster, more, you know, bigger open plan, because that will be good for collaboration and good for innovation and good for people bumping into each other, all of that. The study just says no, that's not really the case. And quite the contrary, if you have smaller areas that are more clearly defined, then, you know, staff would rate those much higher.
Chris Moriarty
We're essentially quantifying some of the stuff that you talked about as intuition. And we're putting numbers on it right is that kind of where we got to with this paper
Kerstin Sailer
It's this two-step process, essentially, the first thing we're doing is to test very openly, whether there is significance, so whether our factors actually make a difference to the satisfaction ratings that people give us. So that's the first step. And with that step, we could already rule out a lot of the factors that we initially thought would play a role. One of the things that we had to rule out was workplace density, because we thought density would matter. But it was a relatively uniform environment, only one floor had more density in it. And so, density didn't show as a kind of significantly valid kind of point. So that was the first step to see which factors matter.
And then in a second step, we would calculate the size effect. So, if you know that the factor matters, how much does it actually matter, you know, so what's the kind of size effect that you would have, and for some of those, the size effects were bigger, and for other smaller, so one of the biggest size effects we had was working productively, and that was for that special metric of control. So, if you feel in control of the room, you have almost everything ahead of you, you are 40 times more likely to rate your workplace as productive than if you are on an average seat where you have half the room in front of you and half the room in your back. So that's quite a stunning, you know, kind of effect size, and where you can see it really, really makes a difference.
Ian Ellison
Okay, so we treat open plan, in our discourses about open plan is very generic and often very negatively. The point is that the layout matters. Very definitely the layout matters and we've got some new research that helps us get under the skin of that but more than that, what you surface in your introduction, which the fancy name for that is this sort of literature review part of it you talk about, well three particular papers, which I think are standout papers you talk about Ellsberg and Pratt, they talk all about trade-offs is not as simple as this is good for that. And that's good for the other. It's that there's always trade-offs to be had. And that's the fact of life.
But you also get these other two papers one, and I'm using the author's names, because the people that know they'll recognise them, Kim and Dedeer, and Bernstein and Turbine are two of the most widely cited internationally, widely cited papers about open plan. And also, papers used to mobilise critique of the effectiveness of open plan. You know, they're the sorts of ones that get reported in national newspapers, on international podcasts with millions of listeners. And they are weaponised, essentially, as tools to condemn things condemn office design, in particular ways. And I think what I got from your paper was, actually, there's a real subtlety to this, that if you are open to different methods of analysis, you can reveal completely different layers, and then think far more sensibly and sensitively about workspace design.
Kerstin Sailer
If I can add one other point here is, the importance of the quality of the actual workplace environment might be much bigger than free food on site, or, you know, all of those kinds of we're talking technology here, right? These kinds of employees have been very spoiled in the past of being pampered left, right and centre. So, what all of that, you know, kind of puts in question is, if you want people to be satisfied with their work, I'm not saying a free canteen is bad, you know, it's lovely for those who can afford it. But if you want people to work well, and to be happy about their work, you also need to look at what kind of workplace design do you put people in
Ian Ellison
We get very obsessed about the perks on the side. But some of these fundamentals could be corrected for with better space design.
Chris Moriarty
So, onto our second paper. Now, one of the things that you often hear amongst people that talk about workplace is that there's always an obsession with office. And a lot of the stuff we talked about, is with offices. And there's a lot of reasons for that. Which is why I'm so excited about this second paper, which is where you take some of the thinking about this, and you don't you're not necessarily explicit about the fact that the two papers are linked, but a lot of the same ideas that you've talked about just now into a hospital environment with a second study that is tied to providing care quality, by design, a new measure, to assess hospital ward layout. So just again, just give us a bit of background about how some of the stuff you just talked about comes into this. And what this study was really trying to establish
Kerstin Sailer
We were thinking that work happens in all sorts of contexts. But a hospital surely is about patients and about healing and caring, etc. But there's also it is a workplace for many, many people and you know, different types of people. We've got doctors and nurses as the two most prominent groups, but there's also all sorts of other you know, kind of people who make sure that the hospital keeps on running, cleaners, porters, etcetera. So, if we think of the hospital as a workplace, the idea then is how can you think about what's the best layout? How would you design a hospital so that it's good for staff to work in, or it's good for patients to be looked after?
And this idea of the best layout in this particular literature has often centred around the kind of typology. So, if you think about the corridor system, is it a straight corridor? Is it an L shaped corridor? Is it radio's, you've got some kind of circles? Or is it a so-called race track, which is a kind of loopy environment, and best in the past has often been measured as shortest walking distance for nurses. So, the idea behind that being a real efficiency kind of metric to kind of say, nurses shouldn't spend that time walking to and fro, they should spend their time caring for the patient. So, if they walk less, then that's a good workplace environment.
And there's even been a metric developed at Yale University, the so-called Yale traffic index, that you can put any layout through, and it will spit out. How good is it in terms of the walking distance? So, based on that, we were thinking, can we focus on the quality of care and the communication patterns between stuff rather than on this kind of functional machine-like efficiency type of argument. So, to kind of think hospital wards are really knowledge workplaces, they're not machines, they're not, you know, a factory floor. So, it's the focus on people I guess.
So, this is built on their PhD of Rosita Pachilova, and in her PhD, she also looked at how busy and hectic those environments are. So, these are standard wards. So, we're not talking emergency room, these are unit kind of standard medical care. And medical staff spend around 50% of their time communicating. So, communicating is the biggest time they invest. Each instance of communication on average is around 44 seconds long. So, it just goes, bam, bam, bam. And they have around 40 conversations every hour, they're on their feet all the time. They talk all the time. And that talking is crucially important for quality of care.
So how can we now bring this spatial layout in? Again, beyond those typologies? Is it racetrack? Is it L shaped? But look at the details of how does the layout support staff in communicating? And how does that communication then get reflected in the quality of care? So, one of the innovations with have to come up with is we couldn't assign workers to desks, as we did in the office paper. So, in the office paper, you could simply say, how happy are you with your work, and we know you sit here. So, it's a reasonable assumption to take the desk location, and the viewsheds as your proxy for where you are.
Now, people are on the move all the time in the hospital. And interestingly, in the UK, nurses don't spend the majority of their time at the nursing station, you might think so but again, that's not the case. So, we couldn't use the nursing station as a proxy. So, what we did was we shadowed people, while Rosita shadowed people, basically following people in their day to day work, looking at where they communicate, and how often they communicate, and bring them together with the view shed on that path. So, as they walk, how much spatial openness do they experience? And how big are their view sheds, as they kind of walk to and fro
Ian Ellison
Are you saying then that sort of thing. So, we've got a given nurse or a given doctor, we've got people within your study, the first thing you need to do is understand how they're working as use the word knowledge workers. So, knowledge workers being people who basically solve problems for a living engaged their brains every minute of the day, because every minute of the day could be different. So, they're busy working on what they got to work on in a medical capacity, they're moving around to do it.
And the initial starting point for this study was to understand within the wards they're working in, where are sort of like the hotspots of communication, where are the things they're typically doing? And when you get there, what are those isovist look like?
Kerstin Sailer
Exactly. So, there was an in-depth study based on six NHS wards, and Rosita followed 102, health care workers for hours and hours and hours. And we then looked at the paths that they took. And we basically calculated the viewsheds. So how big is the view shed from where they walk? And how much time do they spend in those particular? So, we took the temporal aspect into it as well. And so, we were kind of thinking, how much openness or how big views are accumulated on your way to and fro.
So, nurses, for example, walk from the medicine cabinet to the bed, from the patient bed back to the nursing station, from the nursing station, back to another patient bed, etc. So, on those paths, how open is the environment? And how much do you see accumulated by the time that you spent in those different segments
Chris Moriarty
I think it's fair to say takes it a step further than the previous paper, really put some numbers on that we can then reflect back on and almost attached to floor plates, whether they are the six that you did in depth, because you then took this idea and applied it to 31 further floor plates, which weren't part of the in depth study, and assess that against outcomes, which is you've come to the holy grail of a lot of things that the studies are is don't just measure things like cost measure the things that were there, that this floorplates there to support as an outcome. And so, you're able to, to almost predict, like these outcomes, right? Is that Is that fair? A lot of people don't like the word predict. But it kind of felt like you kind of you were able to spot that pattern.
Kerstin Sailer
We were really motivated by this idea that if you're an architect, you know, architects by training, we're kind of thinking, an architect who wants to design a hospital, how would they be guided? And the decisions they take a very practical kind of things, you know, how wide is the corridor? Or where do I place, the nursing station? Where do I place the medicine cabinet? How open are the beds, what can you see from the nursing station to the bed? So those kinds of decisions are very practical. So, what we were trying to do is link both from the practical view of the architect, what are the design decisions that they take every day, but also to the everyday If of people on these wards, what matters to them, and what really matters to them is being able to communicate easily.
And it turns out, if you have more open viewsheds accumulated over time, you communicate more. And the communicating more bed is really a positive thing here because it makes it easier to communicate, it makes it easier to handle that complexity of 44 conversations every hour, there's a kind of constant humming, that is happening in the ward, and constant coordination handover, this patient is not doing well, can you have a look? Or have you done these medications or that patient's needs something else now, you know, all of those things that happen on the fly that are not plan table. So, while a lot of the work seems to be routine, you know, nurse goes to medicine cabinet, picks up medication, dispenses medication to patient one to patient two, etc. So, there are routines, but those routines are played out differently in those environments.
So yes, we're absolutely motivated by trying to link back to kind of practical things, and linking also to outcomes, because it's nice to say, here's a spatial variable, and it shows you that then people communicate more. But there be a lot of cases where people say, so what now they communicate more, is that really good? Are we just turning this into a talking shop, and then being able to link them back to quality of care, in that largest study of 31 wards, I think was a real eye opener for us as researchers, but also, you know, I openness for other people. I mean, this paper won the RABA precedence Research Award. So, there's other people who value this as well
Chris Moriarty
It does really drag an outcome right back to the power of spatial design. Right?
Kerstin Sailer
Exactly. And, you know, I think it's one of those points where you would actually say to architects, you've got so much power in those decisions you take, and also to the clients you know, there's so many stories, if you speak to architects, they come up with these nice plans. And then the client says, oh, but now we need to engineer it down. And now we need to save some costs, could you not make the corridor a little bit smaller. And I've seen this in many studies across different contexts, school buildings, as well, is, you know, wide corridors have a real value in connecting people and letting people communicate giving people a space to just be and not just to functionally move through.
So I think this whole idea of being efficient by value engineering is the term being used, you know, there's no value at all in cutting costs, you know, just call it cutting costs, please, for heaven's sake, you know, so there's a lot of things that then get taken out in terms of design qualities that might have been there, initially. But I think what motivates me and my work is also to think about how we can help architects, you know, to give them an arsenal with clients, and inform how would they design, if only one hospital architects reads this and kind of things. Next time, I'll fight for my nice corridor. That's a win.
Ian Ellison
And you know, what I also got from this, it's really interesting that you said, schools, in your last discussion point, Kerstin, because I'm not just thinking about the architects, I'm wondering about their transferability to other workplaces, schools being one of them, education being one of them. And I'm thinking about, you know, sometimes the architects or anybody involved in the creation of new workspaces is massively, massively constrained by governance. So, I don't know if it's changed recently. But I remember I can't remember why. But I remember finding the blueprints for new academy schools, whether it is a primary school, or a secondary school, or wherever you can literally go into a government website somewhere and find the spec for how big the classrooms allowed to be, how big the corridors are allowed to be. And presumably, the only way you can flex beyond that is if you're out with the system, and you have the money and the resources to be able to be out with the system like independent schools and whatnot.
So, my hunch and a bit I'm not far off is that a lot of those constraints designs probably look very much like the requires improvement in inadequate floor plates of this study. So, by inference, and obviously, it needs testing. This is just to use your phraseology, Chris is just a hot take at this point. But I bet some of those constraints, which have become programmed into the public sector to manage costs and stuff like that, actually, is stifling potential outcomes, potential positive successful outcomes, whether it be health care or education or whatnot, from the outset by design. And here's another way to prove, that right?
Kerstin Sailer
It's a wonderful hypothesis that's what I would call it as a scientist, you know, you're, you're hypothesizing for the next study of what you might likely find. But generally speaking, I think you're right, and the way that I would think of space, ideally, space would support an organisation, that spatial layout should make it easier for the organisation to achieve its goals, whatever that organisation might be, if it's a school, or if it's you know, a hospital or an office, you have certain goals that you want to achieve organisationally, as well as individually for the people in those organisations. And the layout should make it easy for people to do so. A hospital ward should make it easy for those busy lives of nurses, to communicate and to handover and share information. A workplace and office workplace should make it easy for people to get their job done. And both collaborate well and concentrate well.
And if you don't hit it on the spatial level, if the space doesn't allow you to get those things done, then the organisation always has to work against it, you know, you always have to be better, and put in that extra effort, because the space doesn't help you to kind of lift you up. And the way, you know, I would argue Space Act is almost like a probability game, a certain spatial situation a layout, makes it more likely for a certain outcome to happen. And then you're in that layout, you know, eight hours a day, in the case of a nurse 12-hour shifts.
So, every minute of that working day, that opportunity is either there, or you're being deprived of that opportunity. It doesn't mean people can't do good work, they just have to work harder to get that communication done to get that concentration done to, you know, get that interaction or learning or whatever it is that you want to do
Ian Ellison
You have to push against the current because the current is not helping them, it's hindering them. If we were going to bring kind of like key insights, key findings from the two papers together, what can we take away in the round?
Kerstin Sailer
Biggest learning points for me in those two papers, and why I think it makes sense to read them together, is that context matters so much. So, you can't just say, factor x is always good. So, if you put those two papers together, in one case, in the office-based analysis, we showed that spatial openness was detrimental to the organisation's goals. Whereas in the hospital context, we say that spatial openness brings about positive outcomes, that nuanced approach that you need to look very carefully and in depth. And those spatial factors, I think is you know, it really matters to me.
But I also think it's really crucially important in an area where we have all of these loud attention-grabbing headlines to look very carefully and very closely at the context and what is the context and what counts as good outcomes. Rather than saying, oh, workplaces need to be open, or a hospital needs to be in a radial layout. So, I'm trying to move away from those categorisations moving to a position where we look very, very closely to how those things actually look and feel to people on the ground? And not just how does it look at sell to the manager who needs to sign off on this project.
-- Reflection Section --
Chris Moriarty
So, we're on to the reflection section. And for that, we have a very new very special guest joining us for that now we have got Simon Iatrou
Simon Iatrou
I am the Communications Director for North America for magenta associates. Magenta Associates is an integrated communications company that has been specialising in the built environment and workplace for about going on 12 years now, as communications director for North America, I do a whole chunk of work for the agency on this side of the pond. But I still do like to get involved in the UK as well, seeing as they're all now living in a fully remote hybrid world.
Chris Moriarty
You've had a chance to listen to our chat with Kerstin and as our guest first dibs goes to our guest so that we don't steal your thunder. Tell us what you thought of the interview. What was the things that really jumped out of you when you were listening to Kerstin, talk about her research?
Simon Iatrou
I think the overarching message is one that any of us who have been working or writing about workplace for the last few years, will probably understand quite well we've heard about the evils of open plan for going on what 10 years now probably longer. The FT seems to write something about the evils of open plan every other month, and so does the Wall Street Journal and obviously the issue is a little more complicated, a little more complex than that. And I guess, I think the term she used was more fine-grained details.
And some of the kinds of words that stuck with me were control. For a start, I think the more control the employee had over the space, the better view they had of their productivity in the space. And actually, thinking about that I was trying to think about analogies actually, and think is thinking, where could you maybe find analogies in other places other than workplace and you know, I thought, I thought aeroplanes, you have most standard planes, you have three aisle and then three seats. And those three seats are
Chris Moriarty
You can tell he's done long haul, right? I've not been often in one of those planes, there's only two, there's only two blocks when I'm in a plane. By the way
Simon Iatrou
if you're in academy class, those three seats are usually pretty much the same. Right? They're uncomfortable, there's not much space, you certainly I certainly can't sleep on them. But if you have a window seat, or an aisle seat, your experience of that plane journey is dramatically improved than if you're stuck with the middle seat because you can't look out the window. And you have to keep bothering the person on the aisle to move so you don't really have control, or you have less control. I thought that was a good analogy of how looking at the workplace and then seeing how it might apply in other areas or in other settings
Chris Moriarty
That you know, your point there Simon about the fact that open plan the debate there, you know the articles that we get, it's just been kind of constant ever since they kind of the trend has moved in that direction. People have been slagging it off, you know, what Kerstin's work is done for me. And your point about the, this idea of essentially a new for me a new variable that we've never really understood or even knew was there. But to your point Ian I think partway through the interview, and you're saying to Kerstin, about your experience, and I've seen this as well, like, I remember, one of my first jobs, we were all in little pods of four all facing into the middle, right. But as soon as the person near a window in the corner was leaving, there was a little hustle bustle about what any chance I could is anyone who's already bagged that chair. And it was a seniority thing, right? Whoever the most senior person was got the first choice. And then we had to decide whether we wanted to do that.
So, a lot of this stuff intuitively, we've seen, and we've got experience of it. But I guess for me, what was excited about what Kerstin's works demonstrates is that at the design stage, a floor plan stage, you can almost predict this stuff early because there is a new number that we can pop on various desks and say, do you know, that's gonna be an issue that desk or we've got too many of those desks that are presenting an issue. You know, your point, Simon about the different magazines and newspapers that tend to have a history of attacking open plan. I feel like, the feel that the journalist has to declare what their space in tech school would be. And we should all go well, actually, there's a reason you're writing that because it sounds like your, your space is really, it really sucks. And actually, someone over there but you're enjoying it.
Simon Iatrou
Yeah I, just I wonder if it's not open plan isn't the issue is it's no plan that see issue
Chris Moriarty
Or pop that in a frame? That's a quite thing. of you. You've written out in an article Simon, haven't you? I probably have some final some work guys, hold on a minute. Hold on a minute, we paid you to come up with that for us. That's what you paid for. So, Ian, you've hinted at what your point was, you go on it. I know what it is because you got very excited about this pre-interview. You crowbarred it in as hard as you could mid interview. And now you want to talk about it post interview.
Ian Ellison
That's your subtle way of telling me that you're in a monk because I've jumped the queue. Is that what you're saying?
Chris Moriarty
No, no, not at all. I, I've got so much on my list that I can cover and need review. Actually, Simon's crept into a little bit of it. But neither of you have touched its assignment. So Simon, so Ian, you're good to go. Green light.
Ian Ellison
All right, cool. I just pick up the thread from what I said earlier then. So, you've got these two incredibly famous papers critiquing in a scientific and valid way. Open plan. You've got Kim and Dedeer, I think from memory, they were talking about the impact from a health and wellbeing perspective. And you've got Bernstein and Turbine who were from memory looking at communication patterns. And they're both valid, but they're both cited as robust pieces of research and cited globally. But what I found with what Kerstin was talking about was, it's almost like go down a level and Simon used the word granularity and complexity and it it's almost like, you can now see something slightly different. And you can't unsee it.
And once you've seen an opportunity to sort of yield a different type of data, it changes everything, it changes everything permanently, because you can't not see it once you've been there. It's funny, because I guess, as well as just sort of pointing that out, again, because I think it's really, really important, particularly with such an emotive topic, it almost gives people trying to rebut some of the things proposed by the people that have a negative about open plan, it almost gives a way to rebut in a more constructive way than just to try and argue against. But I'm going to channel a bit of James here. So, it's not here with us, I think James would maybe say something at this point around the power of what I think is called combinatory innovation.
It's like, you've got one type of research, and you've got another type of research. And when you bring them together, it yields a new type of insight, which hasn't happened before. Both of those, you know, we've been looking at open plan. And we've been busy doing space syntax, but to look at it in this particular way. And then to go and look at it in health care, yield something different, and it's the beginning of a new opportunity. So, I think it's incredibly positive. And I remember Kerstin, saying that Rosie got the award for this piece of research or a particular award from an architectural professional body for this piece of research. And that is a really impressive thing to achieve.
Chris Moriarty
Simon, in our last episode, we had Esme Banks Mar on who you know very well. And one of the things she talked about was this, invert the headline kind of idea, right? You know, what's the story here? Or that's really positive? Well, let's invert it, because that's gonna get the intention, that's gonna get the clicks. Right. And that's not what she's saying she did. But it's kind of a widely known and kind of unfortunately accepted thing.
And I guess, when he was just talking, those two papers that seem to have really stuck, you know, if they if that was a piece of content by a brand, they'd be delighted, right? Because it's this really sticky report, everyone keeps coming back to it, regardless of what goes on elsewhere. But is there a problem and an inherent problem with a there's a tendency not to come out with a headline that says, Hey, open plans really good? By the way, right? Because everyone's gonna go, whatever, and move on, you know, versus open plan sucks. And everyone goes, Yeah, my open plan sucks, too, you're gonna read this article sort of thing. So, there's a kind of like a confirmation bias
Ian Ellison
People like bad news. Yeah, the confirmation bias. And people, other people have a good negative story. It's interesting, because I bet if you went back to the titles of those academic papers, they wouldn't be sensational. They can't really be sensational. But it's how they get mobilised. And then how that mobilisation pulls eyeballs and pulls perspectives, and then makes it so much harder to do great workspace design work, because that's what it boils down to, doesn't it? We sort of, you know, I'm forever saying this in teaching environments, we've had the knowledge for decades, the problem is mobilising the knowledge in a way that you can actually do good design work with, or you can do change work with to get people embracing new spaces, kind of know what the right things to do are, but it just gets so polluted and tarnished.
Chris Moriarty
So just to bring it back to Simon Ian. So, Simon, what I was asking you. So, there's confirmation bias, right? But I wonder, let's set your challenge on the spot. Right, I've just come to you with Kerstin's report. I'm working on behalf of Kerstin and her team. And I want to get some good publicity on this. How do you quickly cut through the noise with a paper that's technical? You know, by her own admission, she said, there's elements of this that are really technical and the rest of it, how would you cut through with something like this to try and turn around the perpetual myth? That all open plan is evil?
Simon Iatrou
It seems like a lot of the journalists who write very negative, poorly researched articles about open plan. They all have kind of personal grievances, right? They work in really bad offices, probably with open plan systems that they hate. So I think it's about identifying the parts of the research and the reasons why it might be the opposite the readers of the report or the audience that you're publishing the report for, need to understand where there are similarities with how their experiences and the positive ones when you start to count all the variables involved that make a poorly designed open plan, you risk getting stuck in the weeds. Right? And another analogy that I was thinking about stop me if you're bored with football analogies, by the way
Chris Moriarty
No, no, Ian, do you know in loves of football anaolgy
Ian Ellison
Analogies, sure, it's true. I do. I might even try one myself one of these days. It's true.
Simon Iatrou
So, if you keep up with the merry go round of Premier League managers who are appointed and sacked, appointed and sacked, and there are so many that have been sacked this year, and everyone is always so dead certain on making judgments about these guys. And well, he was good enough for that football club. It wasn't good enough. That was a step too far for him. Well, he's, he doesn't have the tactician’s brain for this particular game, or he doesn't have the stature to manage these guides. And I think that really the honest answer and the one that probably we don't like to hear it's a bit of a crapshoot.
Chris Moriarty
Is that a Canadian term? Well,
Simon Iatrou
I think it's an American.
Ian Ellison
I think what he means so we'll have a roll of the dice
Simon Iatrou
Is what I'm trying to say. I think there's, it's hard work. And there's a balance to be made. But the challenge is to understand that there are many, many variables that impact these things. And we can't just, we can't afford to just kind of be lazy in our analysis.
Chris Moriarty
You're right, in that there's this, there's this tendency in our world to look at other people. And go, that will work here because they've done really well, right? Let's just pick that up and pop it here. Like we do with football managers, that person was really successful at that football club popping here. Why didn't it work? Because it's not the same Football Club has not got the same players, it's not going to same cultures don't get the same ambitions, it's got not got the same resources, there's lots of things that aren't the same, I guess, what we need to get into, to your point about okay, we could get a bit kind of bogged down with variables is at least knowing the variables and understanding them and using that as a kind of systematic review of how what is going to work for us. Okay, well, let's start testing this. And we know what to look at, as opposed to saying, we've just done an open plan scheme, we've not really thought much about it, we've thrown everyone in, are you happy, which I'm going to use because I've sat in the chair, is a lovely segue into, I think, the standout statement, but I'm not actually going to use this as my thing, I just want to throw it in, right.
But it was so standout to me that I wrote it down. Right when I was I was listening back to the interview, I think I'm gonna be right and saying here, I say it, wrote it down, I wrote part of it down. So, I need to, I need to try and remember the context on the way into it. That people that were sat in an open plan environment that had everything in front of them, so didn't have anyone behind them, that kind of sense of this stuff going on behind you were 40 times more likely to rate their workplace as productive 40 times. For me what this paper represents is that we spent loads and loads of time talking about the things that make a workplace work, right and get very excited about data that says this will work and you know, in these amazing buildings, this works.
But here's something just one example of something that's never been measured, right until now. And in this study, that people might intuitively know, but something that's influencing a single measure by 40 times that shouldn't be ignored, right. That's like, that's, I think that's the nugget. So, I'm just gonna leave that hanging there. Because my actual thing, and this is where I'm, you know, with, I've been inspired by your attendance Simon, I'm going into story narrative mode, right. But something struck me when I was listening to Kerstin that she talked about, and it's kind of linked to what I just talked about there. She talked about this idea of predators behind us, right, this kind of instinct that we have that we don't like things behind us because it could be a predator.
And as I oh, that's interesting, because now Nigel Oseland spoke about that in our interview with Nigel, because he was talking about, you know, environmental psychology and we don't like people sneaking up behind us. And I thought quite two examples of this kind of idea of evolution, and how humans have been put into these unnatural environments, and our natural instincts are working against what we're put into. And that then is a nice arc got me thinking about Gabriella Braun and what she talked about in our episode, where she sort of talked about the fact that over time, what we've been doing this, like almost dehumanizing ourselves in the pursuit of profit.
And I was like cheese, all these three things, they all connect in sort of a weird kind of threads. That actually what we're saying here is, and one of our listeners, Simone Fenton Jarvis will be delighted with this idea, but just the kind of this idea of a human working environment, one that understands our humanity and designs for our humanity, and all the stuff that comes with it, whether it be our emotions, and Gabrielle is example or whether it be this kind of environmental psychology and this idea of predators behind us. It just got me thinking that hopefully some of this research can start to kickstart a kind of revaluation of what we're putting people into, particularly in this post hybrid world question at the back Ian Ellison.
Ian Ellison
So, whilst you've been talking there that got me looking at Prospect and refuse theory, because that's essentially glad I was holding your attention. You weren't because I was listening. I was thinking right now, because this is the bit of evolutionary psychology and I quickly found a paper online, it is called prospect and refuge theory constructing a critical definition for architecture and design. And it's by Dosen and Ostwald in 2013. And this is really interesting, particularly with relevance to Kerstin and colleagues’ paper, the theory of prospect of refuge seeks to describe why certain environments feel secure, and thereby meet basic human psychological needs. Environments that meet such needs will often provide people with the capacity to observe prospect without being seen refuge.
And I'm going to fast forward through this stuff now. But since its original proposition is 75, folks have struggled to kind of identify they get it conceptually, but how do we make that real in terms of office design, it was applied in the 90s, to Frank Lloyd Wright architecture, to kind of exemplify that it existed. And this paper in 2013 is kind of trying to come up with a definition for what it means. Here we are 10 years later, because I haven't had chance during the space of this conversation to look any deeper into this particular paper but can put a link to it in the show notes. But here we are, in this episode, with Kerstin, essentially giving us parameters to understand exactly that prospect and refuse amongst other things. So, what a lovely way to show the progress of academic knowledge on this particular topic, from a generalist idea would derive from environmental psychology to something which is recognised 10 years ago, in architecture, to something which we've now worked out how to measure. That's lovely.
Simon Iatrou
But I guess the challenge then, is, I mean, I'm sure the right designer could put something together that ensures that most people are in a setting or in a workstation or space where they can, but there will always be winners and losers.
Chris Moriarty
But I suppose if you and I'm sure Kerstin, let us let us stay when she listens to this, because she's one of our favourites because she listens, and then gets in touch with us on LinkedIn, folks, remember, you can get in touch with us on LinkedIn. But I have customers here now. And we said, yeah, there's gonna be winners and losers. I guess what she's demonstrated, and her team have demonstrated is that we could put numbers on this now we could put a, like a score on each person's head on each desks top.
And we can make sure that the kind of aggregate is that we're not going to have massive winners and massive losers, we're going to level it out, you know, and yes, some people are going to have a slightly higher or lower score, whichever way you look at it, but we're going to make sure that no one's in real trouble here, you know, we're going to make sure that, you know, if you are the loser, then at least the impact of that loss is going to be mitigated slightly, because we can now measure it, we can now in the same way that I think it's exciting that we've got a lot of digital technology now like BIM, and digital twin and all this sort of stuff, we can get a lot of this insight before we've even put a shovel in the ground, right? We can, we can go look, we're going to put this through, Ziggy and Ziggy is going to come back and tell us that's a cult reference to quantum leap for anybody of a certain vintage, we're going to pop this through zig and it will tell us it will tell us what the impact is going to be here.
And if we make some adjustments, we can start seeing how well we can level this out as best we can. You know if that's the next step on this open plan journey, then you know it's going to be thanks to people like Kerstin and, and the team for coming up with this stuff. Because beforehand, it was, you know, intuition is great, but you know, it's a much special powerful when you can put some numbers against it. So, Simon, thank you so much for joining us all the way from Canada. Is it true that Canadians are really nice?
Simon Iatrou
They are they're very polite.
Chris Moriarty
Have you not had a single argument over there yet?
Simon Iatrou
No. But then you get into the big city in Toronto and then not so polite.
Chris Moriarty
Okay, well, I should imagine that our sponsorship opportunity with the Toronto Tourist Board is probably just I love I love Toronto.
Chris Moriarty
As the locals I still haven't quite mastered this as the locals pronounce it. Toronto, Toronto, Toronto. Yeah, if you don't pronounce it like that you're the outsider.
Chris Moriarty
But I bet they're really nice about it as well. They don't make you feel like an outsider because they're just so nice. Well look Simon I hope you'll join us again because James is so antisocial that he probably won't want to come on to another episode. I'd love to. Well, we will have you back with open arms Simon. So, thanks for joining us.
-- Outro --
Chris Moriarty
There we go. We've put the links to the papers we've discussed today in the show notes, including more information about Kerstin and brainy birds. So please, please, please do go and check all that out. And remember to rate review and recommend the show to help build our community. And please do get in touch either via LinkedIn community search for Workplace Geeks, and you'll find us, or you can use a #workplacegeeks that's #workplacegeeks. And of course, you can email us at hello@workplacegeeks.org or visit our shiny new website and join the mailing list sign up at Workplace Geeks.org speak to you next time
