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Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices (2011)
- skj 9y agoThe title makes it seem (to me) like they're finding that open plan offices reduce sickness. But they're not reporting on the absence of sickness, but rather absence due to sickness, which they found occurred at a higher rate in open offices.
- sqldba 9y agoThe latter is how I understood it.
- scbrg 9y agoWhere are you from? I'm guessing that how you interpret the title might depend on your native language/dialect. Judging by the names of the authors, I'm guessing they're mostly Danish, or at least Scandinavian. As a native speaker of another Scandinavian language (Swedish), I understood the title as it was intended, but I'm not sure if the phrase "sickness absence" is the best way of expressing "absence due to sickness" to a native English speaker.
- kwhitefoot 9y agoBritish English would use "Sick leave". But I also speak Norwegian so perhaps that explains why it seemed unremarkable until I saw the comment above.
- vvesperr 9y agoI'm American and I understood "sickness absence" as the intended "sick leave" or "absence DUE TO sickness" but it did take me a second.
- davidgerard 9y ago(2011) - have there been any further studies or attempts at replication?
- nils-m-holm 9y agoNoise, permanent distraction, regular interruption, no privacy, and people spreading germs all over the place. No wonder that people get sick! I would rather be poor than work in a shared office one more time. (I have experienced both, so I know what I'm talking about.)
- protonfish 9y agoI was just reading about a "Mars study" where 6 people were in close quarters for 8 months to examine the behavioral effects of a long-term space mission. https://www.apnews.com/bafab7eaf7be45d388f11ef81e7f15d8/Mars-research-crew-emerges-after-8-months-of-isolation https://www.apnews.com/bafab7eaf7be45d388f11ef81e7f15d8/Mars... The article didn't say much about the results, other than: > We’ve learned, for one thing, that conflict, even in the best of teams, is going to arise I immediately though of my experience with open office plans.
- throwanem 9y agoSo have I. I wouldn't.
- loup-vaillant 9y agoI bet it depends on how poor you were, and how noisy the open plan was. Tolerances also vary.
- JustSomeNobody 9y agoAnd higher stress levels from working in open offices.
- maxxxxx 9y agoEspecially the noise is wearing me down.
- Toast_25 9y agoHow is it like in the US? I've mostly had positive experiences in open offices (except for an annoying co-worker or two), but then again, I've never had my own office, only worked from home a few times.
- nautilus12 9y agoDo they determine that people just take more sick days because they need some level of privacy while they work or because they are actually are getting sick more often? I would think its the former, tbh
- a3n 9y agoI know it's a stretch, but the former could be analyzed in terms of sickness.
- tolien 9y agoThe paper actually refers to analysis of how background noise raises stress levels (with the resulting effect on absence) so it’s not so big a stretch.
- sanxiyn 9y agoOffice design's impact on sick leave rates (2014) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24460745 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24460745 investigated this question. "Sick leaves were self-reported ... as number of short and long (medically certified) sick leaves... A significant excess risk for sickness absence was found only in terms of short sick leaves." Which supports your hypothesis.
- sidlls 9y agoHow does that support the hypothesis? One might conclude that the non-open plans mitigate the spread of short term sickness (e.g. colds) instead.
- sanxiyn 9y agoSupport, not definite evidence. It could be that both short and long sick leaves are affected. Compared to that, it supports "not actually getting sick more often".
- 9y ago
- ivanjovanovic 9y agoI am curious if sickness increase is caused by mental aspects of sharing the office or the transmittable diseases factor. Authors didn't get into these details the from what I see by briefly looking at the whole paper.
- sethammons 9y agoThree plausible reasons off the top of my head on why open offices would experience less reported sick days. One: the same reason as experienced by garbage men or sewer guys; greater exposure causing improved immune systems. Two: being in an open office increases the top-down butts-in-seat observability, causing employees to come into the office even while sick to keep up a better work image. Three: (what happens at my work) perhaps the work places that can support an open office can also support working from home and so instead of sick days being days off, employees just work from home with minor ailments, reducing the number of reported sick days. At least for me, if I have a slight cold, I'm still up for a mostly productive day, but I don't want to spread a cold to others in the office. So I work from home.
- arjie 9y agoMate, the results are the opposite. More sick days in open offices.
- Joe-Z 9y agoThe findings were that open-plan offices lead to more sick days (62% compared to cellular offices)
- Sharlin 9y agoThe finding is that open/shared offices increase, not decrease, sickness absences.
- sethammons 9y agoApparently I should not read when I first wake up if I want to avoid down voting :) I clearly read it backwards and thought it was an odd result so I jotted down a few reasons why I thought the strange result could occur. More obviously, if you are closer to other sick people, your odds of getting sick are higher.
- arjie 9y agoTable 2: median days of sickness in single person offices in last year: 1.0. Median days of sickness in 6+ person offices: 2.0. Respective means are 4.9 and 8.1.
- DangerousPie 9y agoWhat's your point? Simply comparing the median is not really going to tell you much, especially since you need to adjust for confounding factors.
- arjie 9y agoWhen evaluating risk, I like knowing the absolute consequences, not relative consequences. The abstract has the relative consequences. My comment has the absolute consequences. Since there are maybe a fixed 230 working days in a year, a thing that takes me from 10 absences to 12 absences is worse for me than a thing that takes me from 1 absence to 2 absences. I'd rather not compare the two as 20% up vs 100% up. If anyone else felt the same, my comment would help.
- DangerousPie 9y agoThat's fair enough, but the numbers you give are neither the absolute nor the relative consequences. You can't draw any conclusions from simply comparing the medians. On one hand that completely ignores any confounding variables which could lead to either over- or underestimation of the true difference. And on the other hand the medians may not be particularly meaningful. For example, if the effect only occurred in the top 25%ile of employees, the median would stay the same even if all of the ones in open plan offices were sick for the entire year. If you took the mean instead of the median the difference would already be 8.1 - 4.9 = 3.2 days.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- arjie 9y ago
- imglorp 9y agoRecognizing the ongoing discussion we keep having here about office planning, what other meaningful open plan research is laying around? Re productivity, roi, job satisfaction, creativity, etc?
- geff82 9y agoJust a personal observation: when I first moved into a giant-open plan office in 2015 in a big German company, I got significantly more sick. It was horror. Also, bathrooms were unusually crowded, probably helping spread diseases. Since then, it seems my body got a bit used to it and I am sick less often. But is is still more than the times before. What might also increase days that people are not there: at least in our office we actively encourage people not to come back from sickness soon. We urge them to stay at home to avoid spreading disease further. While I personally might come back to a single office after 2-3 days, as I can't that easily infect other people in my private office, I stay away for a week more often now.
- zebraflask 9y agoThis fits with my experience. My department has some cubicle farms and some shared but much more private office suites. The cube farm people are always getting sick. Somebody comes in with a cough and promptly spreads it. It then can take weeks before there's a week without somebody sick. Getting people to stay home when they are sick has been harder to implement than you'd think. I've tried with my work team. A number of the developers are from cultures that have what I would call a very stubborn "must work at all costs" mentality. It can take some persuasion (berating?) to get some of them to see that taking a sick day doesn't make them a "bad worker," but showing up sick, getting other people sick, and pushing buggy code because they're sick does.
- logfromblammo 9y agoEver since companies ditched vacation and sick leave in favor of combined PTO, I work while sick. When I had sick leave, I used it. It may well be that they don't want to cut their July vacation short by a day because they caught a cold in January. And to compound the issue, it was probably a cold they caught at work, because the company leave policy reinforces the behavior. People who stay home when sick are punished with shorter vacations.
- rbadaro 9y agoThat is very US specific. In Europe, in a lot of office-based work if you get sick you take some days off and it doesn't impact your normal yearly 20-30 day vacation allowance. If you need more than X days (in my case 5), you need a paper from your doctor, otherwise you self declare as sick. At my workplace, people tend to work from home if they are just feeling a bit sick.
- fairview14 9y agoI'm working full remote. My sickness absence is almost 0%, only a few days last year due to a flu.
- icebraining 9y agoI'm working in an open plan office. My sickness absence last year was zero. That's anecdotes for ya.
- consp 9y agoWith N=2 and testing all variables we conclude that working does not make you sick and keeps you healthy.
- chrisper 9y agoBut are you working in an open office at home? Probably not, and that's why you didn't get sick!
- kross 9y agoRoot cause: bad sickness/time off/work from home policies.
- fizgig 9y agoI think this is a big part of it. I currently have 15 PTO days per year, which includes sick leave. If I'm feeling off, I'll ask if I can work from home, which I always get denied (which is odd, since I do after-hours maintenance and on-call incidents remotely). So rather than piss away PTO, I dose up on drugs and drag my ass to the office. If I had dedicated sick leave, I'd just take the day off. But this miserly PTO policy results in me hoarding it.
- kwhitefoot 9y agoWhat is PTO?
- zolthrowaway 9y agoPaid time off
- susam 9y ago"Personal time off" or "paid time off". It is an informal term that is usually synonymous to a more formal term such as "casual leave" in many companies.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- moron4hire 9y agoA bastardization of leave policies that lumps pleasure and rest time in with convalescence such that people new to an office often don't get to take real vacations after having spent all of their PTO on gaining immunity to a new germ pool.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
- NicoJuicy 9y agoGetting more sick ==> More resistance against diseases? That's always something i'm wondering.
- DanBC 9y agoPeople being off for stress related illness doesn't necessarily protect them from future stress (unless their treatment includes resilience). It also increases pressure on colleagues, increasing their risk of stress related illness.
- drukenemo 9y agoYou don't build immunity to a virus that constantly mutates, e.g. the flu virus.
- sjcsjc 9y agoIt would be interesting, but perhaps not terribly useful, to see how sickness absence varies between contract and permanent staff. In the past, when contracting, I have dragged myself to work when feeling dreadful.
- make3 9y agothat's funny, at work (a large, well known & appreciated software company) contract workers take pride in coming to work at 11h+ or just not coming in unless really required
- katastic 9y agoThat sounds a lot more like people who are trying super hard to become full-time workers. That the situation one of my college buddies (and all his fellow contractors) endured for a couple years. They did everything the normal workers did, but since they were technically "contractors" in title, everyone treated them like second-class citizens. (Caveat: Major japanese company--but still in the USA.) If that's not the case with yours, I'm glad they're not in the same situation. My friend eventually moved up to one of the top contracters and still couldn't get into the company proper so he had to seek employment elsewhere.
- EvanAnderson 9y agoDealing with illness and work is something that's important for everybody but I think it's something contractors (or other non-salary workers) need to be especially cognizant of. I've been contracting for the last 13 years. I've had a few occasions where I feel I "worked through" a period of illness too enthusiastically and ended up making myself feel worse and lengthening the illness. Knowing that you need to bill, and therefore need to work, is tough to balance against stopping work to get better. It's been a tough lesson for me, but I try very hard to slow down or even stop work when I'm sick. On the last occasion I really tried to "power through" an illness (with a persistent bad cough and even more persistent sore throat) I started thinking about Jim Henson's death. That made me slow down. Nothing is worth that.
- jasonmaydie 9y agoIsn't this common knowledge? Kids who go to daycare get more sick in the beginning, less sick in general.
- parasight 9y agoI would have bet on it. Greater exposure to germs, probably worse hygiene and higher levels of stress.
- brightfog 9y agoI don't think it's about open-offices or not: Work environments just don't reflect work anymore. There isn't any rational reason for knowledge workers to go to an office every day. Socializing and building a cult around a company might be the only reasons. But IDK if these are enough to justify an office. There must be another solution we aren't aware of yet.
- AlanSE 9y agoI don't think you can really undersell the cult-building aspect, in addition to the psychological factors, which are heavily intertwined. Co-working spaces have actually been rather successful in outsourcing these factors - both the cultism and the necessity for human interaction. Not every company needs its own brand of Kool-aid, especially when the cultural attraction of many tech companies is indistinguishable from the industry as a whole. It may be beneficial to have core values that are shared among a cluster of companies, and reap some advantages of scale that brings with it.
- barkingtoad 9y agocorporate told us to call it TEAM-building.
- aedron 9y agoNo remote working solution comes close to in-person collaboration, in my opinion. I can explain someone something in probably less than half the time in person than over some electronic link-up. I'm not sure what it is (lack of body language? Lack of shared physical presence and tools?) or if it can be remedied by better technical solutions (it's possible), but it's the reality right now.
- brightfog 9y agoYes and no. You can build great working relationships in the office but also remotely. You can have really bad conflicts in the office but also remotely. I think the difference is that once you got attached to some people from your work that the motivation to see and talk to them is one key driver to work for the company every day. This attachemnt might develop faster in an office environment.
- turk184 9y agoI'm like Jyn Erso when it comes to these open office plans--I rebel! It's easy for me to eat a lot of gas-inducing foods and then just do what I do best! Nobody likes people who fart.
- aanastasov 9y agoHas anyone been able to find the data used in the study?
- traxmaxx 9y agoMaybe in the PDF? http://www.sjweh.fi/download.php?abstract_id=3167&file_nro=1 http://www.sjweh.fi/download.php?abstract_id=3167&file_nro=1
- aanastasov 9y agoI've read (mostly skimmed through) the entire paper and didn't see any mention of the data being public.
- quantumhobbit 9y agoLet’s not forget that it often makes sense to call in sick just to be able to complete work that requires concentration in a quiet environment.
- overcast 9y agoI never get sick, so my sick time is just personal time for when I don't feel like coming in work. But mainly I just use it for working on my own personal projects. Silent environment at home is amazing compared to a busy office. I wish our open office space, was converted to sound proof cubes.
- edw519 9y ago<rant> I call B.S. 1. "associated" means nothing. "Anything" can be "associated" with "anything else". "significantly related" is almost as worthless. Correlation is better than association. Causation is better than correlation. Where's any of that? This is just a hypothesis, not a conclusion. 2. I've been working in corporate offices for 38 years in every possible environment imaginable: private office, war room, open office, basement, hallway, double office, even a closet. One place someone came in and yelled, "Get out of here now! There's mold everywhere!" Sure enough, hazmat had to clean the office. 3. I have NEVER missed a day of work. EVER. Some people say I'm lucky. That's probably a little bit true. But not really. Read on... 4. Here's a list of things that I believe (without any supporting data or government research) have "significantly more impact" on sickness absence that open-plan offices: diet, lifestyle, movement of any kind, drug use, tobacco, alcohol, stress from work, stress from non-work, medical history, genetics, donut consumption. 5. I loathe open offices for many reasons (mainly because those deciding these things have no idea how to achieve, but that's another rant). But cut me a break, blaming open offices for sickness absence is really a reach. Without proper controls, the statistical evidence presented by OP can be caused by many other co-factors. (See #4 above.) 6. Never get health info from the internet. </rant>
- dkersten 9y ago> stress from work, Open offices cause me significant amounts of stress (for varous reasons), so... does that means that open offices are in your list, under the “stress from work” category?
- bretpiatt 9y agoToo many variables to isolate on this study to provide proof that correlation equals causation. Even with the isolating they've tried to do with the 95% CI the range is: 1 Person Office: 1 (They didn't report a range here) 2 Person Office: 1.13-1.98 sick days 3-6 Person Office: 1.08-1.73 sick days (LOWER than 2) 6+ Person Office: 1.30-2.02 sick days Great item to study further. This isn't scientific proof of anything. As a solo worker you may come in to the office when sick as well since you don't have to worry about getting anyone else sick and so many other variables they didn't control for make this interesting but far from proof. Direct PDF link to full study: http://www.sjweh.fi/download.php?abstract_id=3167&file_nro=1 http://www.sjweh.fi/download.php?abstract_id=3167&file_nro=1
- wott 9y agoThere is a perfect positive correlation between smoking + alcohol consumption and health! 1 person: heavy smokers 15%, drinkers 16% 3-6 pers: heavy smokers 13%, drinkers 16%, sick leave +36% 2 pers: heavy smokers 10%, drinkers 15%, sick leave +50% > 6 pers: heavy smokers 9%, drinkers 13%, sick leave +62% Please drink and smoke more to fight sickness.
- loup-vaillant 9y agoThey said they controlled for those confounding variables. I bet the raw data used in this study also says smokers and drinkers are more often sick than the others.
- aanastasov 9y agoYou've quoted rates not absolute values.
- masnick 9y agoNote that they don’t report a confidence interval for the one-person office because it is the baseline for the other rate ratios. (This is generally how the baseline group is identified when reporting ratios in journal articles.)
- dragonwriter 9y ago
- sharemywin 9y agoyou mean like classrooms in schools?
- louprado 9y agoPSA of the day: With practice you can learn to delay your sneeze by a second or two. That gives you time exhale all the air from your lungs so the sneeze has minimal power[1]. Tilt your head down too and with further practice you can learn to open your throat in order to minimize air velocity. [1] Source: me, a former obnoxiously loud sneezer that always dismissed it as an unavoidable and comical physiological quirk because I am too big and manly to sneeze quietly. It isn't, it wasn't, and I'm not. edit: added a step.
- pavel_lishin 9y agoThis is the first time it's occurred to me that other people cannot control their sneezes. I've had the occasional "where the hell did that come from?" sneeze, but they're a rare exception, maybe a few times a year. I cannot fathom not being able to control something like a sneeze; to me, it would feel like not being able to control farting, coughing or talking.
- falsedan 9y ago> like not being able to control farting, coughing or talking Did you know? Plenty of people cannot control these actions 100%. Please don't assume others are like you.
- chelseafan 9y agoYeah, some people apparently cannot, in fact, shut the fuck up and be polite. Guess it's just a personality quirk!
- peacequiet99 9y agoYeah, I guess not being able to shut the fuck up and be polite is just a personality quirk.
- thomnottom 9y agoAre you honestly suggesting that not being able to control semi-autonomous bodily functions is a matter of personality traits?
- emodendroket 9y agoSeems like an intuitive result.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mattrices 9y agoThis makes me wonder how many of those additional absences in open plan offices are due to depression / introverts recoiling in horror rather than increased biological pathogen transmission.
- realbarack 9y agoIt's definitely not just introverts either—me and a number of friends are not introverts per se but definitely take advantage of WFH whenever possible just to have some privacy and a break from the chaos.
- ams6110 9y agoThat was my thought. When I worked in large open "bullpen" office I certainly did "take a sick day" from time to time just because I could not stand the thought of spending 8 hours in that environment on that day. I was never actually sick any more often than normal during that time.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- gcb0 9y agoin open floor offices you are elbow to elbow to somebody else all day long. sick days are just a way to cope with that and get away from those people. especially with engineers. or take some time at home to do things online like buying tickets for a concert that you don't want to talk about in the office. its stressful to be watched every second. sick days and "have a cold, will work from home" are just a way to escape. doubt anyone was really sick.
- tpudlik 9y agoPlease note that the study defines any office space shared by more than 6 people as "open plan". Also, although there's a (statistically) significant difference between 1 person offices and "open plan", there is no significant difference between 2 person offices and"open plan".
- rdtsc 9y agoNot a bad metric. After about 4 people or so, it might as well be "open office". That is the chance of each one of those people being distracted by someone from outside the office, or a phone, or two of them talking about something is pretty high. (Worked in a cubicle farm, 4 person office, 3 person office, 2 person, then my own office, now at home in my own office). Top choice is work at home. Then own office. Then 2 person office. Once it gets to 3 person office, I'd pick a cubicle with high sound insulated walls. Open office would be a nightmare for me. I'd get set just from stress of not being able concentrate and get my work done.
- ijafri 9y agoas an HR manager, we had to adopt open plan, for our own reasons, however before we did so, we have made our hygienic rules 10x stricter, But I guess solely chalking up sickness to open plan is bit too far-fetched, there are still too many public places, commute, public washrooms etc that one can't avoid ... having said, this also depends higher than usual standards for hygienic at work.
- loup-vaillant 9y agoMay I ask what were those reasons? I always hear why open plans are horrible, never why they're awesome —or needed.
- TaylorGood 9y agoMy two years in corporate america was open floor; side by side plus in front of you. When someone was sick, it usually took down the people sitting within the quadrant. Since there wasn't sick days, everything was under PTO and Vacation > Recovering at home. Just not a good system.
- hedonistbot 9y ago62% more days of sick leave is an acceptable trade off for most employers. If the alternative is a separate office for everyone, the rent expenses will be more than the paid leave loss. And the only thing upper management cares about is the bottom line. So in a sense, increased productivity in the economy is partially paid by our degrading health. That's not something often mentioned in the Economics text books.
- noonespecial 9y agoSounds like an OSHA issue. Open office plans plus stingy or non-existent sick leave policies now provably cause hazardous work places.
- SAI_Peregrinus 9y agoWhen I get sick, I wear a surgical mask. You can buy them at any drugstore. You might get weird looks, but explaining that I'm sick and don't want to spread it usually turns those into thanks. It's apparently common/expected to do this in Japan, it would likely help if the practice spread elsewhere.