Open Office Layout In The Workplace

With wages being a large cost factor for most businesses it is only natural to consider ways to increase the effectiveness of the workforce. For this thesis, the focus will be put on office workers, and how they can be influenced by the layout of their workspace. In particular, there will be a close look at the currently most popular trend in office space design, the open plan office. Even though there have been multiple different concepts and variation of open offices they all share certain criteria which have been condensed into this definition of “open office”:
An “open office” is a workspace without solid walls that separate smaller offices, but rather features many workspaces in large rooms.
Since its conception in the late 20th century

Based on the previous section there should now be a clear picture on the strengths and weaknesses of open offices, derived from actual evidence. This question deals with the possible alternatives that might be better in one more aspects.
Currently there seems to be an opinion-divide on open offices, with managers and advisors preferring and recommending them, and, on the other side, workers not enjoying working in them. Is this the actual truth? Or is it only a vocal minority that influences the popular conception of open offices? With the help of grounded research, this question can be put to rest, and future office architects can be sure to choose the layout that will benefit the company the most.
1.3 Methodology and Research Design
As the first Bachelor thesis is only a literature based thesis the most important source will be already published literature. The focus will be on studies that look at the effects of open plan offices, in order to collect all the relevant information about the real life consequences of working in such an office. It is important to focus on studied effects, because it is a primary goal to eliminate “anecdotal” evidence from the evaluation of open plan offices. 2 The open office in

Furthermore, in order to better examine the implications of open offices, a clear definition is needed. For the purposes of this thesis, an open office shall be defined as a workspace with six or more workers in the same room. This definition is borrowed from Pejtersen et al. (2011, 376-382). Even though there exist offices with larger numbers of occupants, six appears to be a sufficient number to see an effect when looking at open and cellular