How to Design Brain-Friendly Flexible Offices

The cages in modern zoos are better for animals, than modern offices for people, because modern ZOO-directors know more about the inborn needs of their animals, than company-directors and architects about the innate needs of people. This book provides the scientific basis for a very urgently needed revolution in office design. Every manager or executive with any responsibility for an office, should have this basic knowledge, to lease, design or redesign offices that improve rather than undermine the intellectual productivity of their workers. If you need to do work that requires concentration and you can hear other people's (phone)conversations, your office is unfit for brainwork and you should know these facts to start the discussion about the improvement of their work environment. Working in an open plan office decreases your intellectual productivity, creativity and wellbeing very significantly. If you try to keep up your concentration in such an office against the massive distractions, you pay the price of spending more energy, having more stress and leaving the office more exhausted than in an office with less distraction. The negative impact of these distractions that are outside of your control, is worsened by the distractions that you should control yourself: especially email, antisocial media and surfing the web. You're a knowledge-worker or a manager of these brainworkers. But what do you know that's really practically useful about your most important instrument for your work, well-being and success; your brain? What do you know about the effect on your brain, your intellectual productivity and wellbeing, of the improper use of your wonderful information and communication technology, of always being online, of multitasking, constant stress, lack of sleep and ... poorly designed open offices? For 99% of the professionals and managers the answer is: NOTHING!In my book "BRAINCHAINS. Discover your brain and unleash its full potential in a hyperconnected multitasking world" I explain some essentials about your thinking brain, the ways you unknowingly chain it and the solutions (see www.brainchains.info). As a result of the success of this book, I am all the time invited by companies and other organizations, for workshops and presentations about these "BrainChains". Then, too often I am kindly requested not to talk about the negative impact of open offices, a request I usually ignore, because the issue is much too important for the productivity and health of modern office workers. I learned in the past five years that most executives are totally uninformed about the crystal-clear scientific conclusions about the negative effects of open offices... or do they knowingly choose a very short term ostrich policy, even if it undermines the long term productivity and wellbeing of their employees. I prefer to choose the ignorance-hypothesis. Therefore, in this booklet I summarize the research of others and myself and give my own conclusions. Originally, this was a chapter of my book "BrainChains". In the final stages of writing "BrainChains" however, I realized that my book is about counterproductive issues and behaviors that can you can and should control yourself, while your office is outside your influence, unless you are the CEO or an executive responsible for the infrastructure. Therefore I removed the chapter and turned it into this separate book. This is its third edition of this book. The title of the first edition in 2014 was: "The Open Office is Naked". It was a somewhat angry book, because the more research I found about the negative impact of open plan offices, the less I understood why companies keep building and leasing these counterproductive brain-warehouses, against all evidence. I felt like the boy shouting "The emperor is naked!" in a crowd of people who behaved as if the naked emperor parading in the street was wearing beautiful clothes, because they feared to be considered ignorant and incompetent.