Hey, are you at work right now?

And do you work in an office?

Have you ever worked in an office?

If you have, there's a good chance it was an open office, at least to some degree.

The open office design has been around for decades in a variety of forms.

If you are a cynic, you might think an open office is all about cramming the maximum number

of employees into the minimum amount of real estate.

But you could also imagine that an open office produces better interaction and more collaboration.

Wouldn't it be nice to know if this were true?

That's what these people wanted to learn.

I'm Ethan Bernstein.

I'm an associate professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School.

My name is Stephen Turbin.

I am a recent graduate of Harvard College.

And I currently work for a global management consultant's seat.

Okay, so we're here to talk about a paper that you co-authored called The Impact of the

Open Workspace on Human Collaboration.

I don't think I realized how much anger there was against open offices until the research

was published and I was contacted by a number of friends and colleagues about their open

offices and their deep, deep emotional scarring.

There's certainly a population of people out there who hate.

I think that's perhaps even not strong enough of work.

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