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The following is an excerpt from the Herman Miller Research Summary: Beyond Four Walls and a Door(©2003). “The Private Office they needed—and they were the ones whose offices had four walls and a door. Enclosure does allow more control—or the perception of more control. It may include the cachet of status. It does increase separation between self and others. It can provide psychological privacy, conveying the message that the occupant is in control of interactions that occur and doesn’t need supervision to work well. However, Fritz Steele points out that “closed offices provide visual separation, but they are no guarantee of audial privacy. In fact, they may provide a false sense of security when people should instead be aware that they can easily be overheard.” In his studies of office workers, Eric Sundstrom found a correlation between architectural privacy and psychological privacy. But his conclusion—that this may be “because people in private quarters can control their accessibility to others more easily than in open and visible places,”—suggests that the real issue is not enclosure, but control over accessibility. Private office dwellers must balance control with accessibility. For example, there are norms about having the door open. It is generally considered unacceptable, for instance, for a manager to close the door to the office when he or she is inside working alone. Even with an open-door policy, managers rate their availability far differently than their employees do. Employees rated a manager who believed his door was open 95 percent of the time as having the door closed 95 percent of the time.” For the complete text of this research summary, please CONTACT Thomas Interior Systems at info@thomasinterior.com." |
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