Missing voices: Office space discontent as a driving force in employee hybrid work preferences

• Published date: 01 January 2024
• Author: Lila Skountridaki,W. Victoria Lee,Lilinaz Rouhani
• Date: 01 January 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12415

DOI: 10.1111/irj.12415

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Missing voices: Office space discontent

as a driving force in employee hybrid

work preferences

Lila Skountridaki

1

|W. Victoria Lee

2

|Lilinaz Rouhani

3

1

The University of Edinburgh Business

School, Edinburgh, UK

2

Edinburgh School of Architecture and

Landscape Architecture (ESALA),

Edinburgh College of Art,

Edinburgh, UK

3

Queen Mary University of London,

Research Services, London, UK

Correspondence

Lila Skountridaki, The University of

Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.

Email: lila@skountridaki.com

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on rich qualitative and survey data to

show that employee discontent with office space is a

major driving force in employee hybrid‐work prefer-

ences. Despite voice marginalisation, employees wish

to take advantage of increased control over their

physical working conditions and the locus of work

that hybrid work has unexpectedly brought in their

working lives. Taking cues from the literature on

employee voice, this paper suggests that employee

missing or silenced voices can be conceptualised as

latent: hidden but potentially influential and inactive

but potentially triggered by shifts in the labour market

conditions or other external to organisations changes.

The paper also brings attention to empirical academic

studies as an employee voice mechanism.

1|INTRODUCTION

The pandemic‐enforced working from home has debunked the assumption that employee

productivity suffers when working remotely. Staff visibility serves the purpose of managerial

control, but not necessarily management's key functions, including organisational efficiency or

the conversion of employees' capacity for labour into actual labour (Littler, 1990). Studies have

shown that working from home has driven productivity up for large segments of the workforce,

despite adverse conditions during lockdowns (Feldsted, 2020). This paper focuses on debunking

Ind. Relat. 2024;55:54–77.54

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wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/irj

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and

reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2023 The Authors. Industrial Relations Journal published by Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

another workplace myth: the belief that large shared office spaces, whether open‐plan or hot

desking, are essential in our organisational lives. While open‐plan offices may be justified by

direct control or cost containment, they often come at the expense of productivity and well‐

being for many employees (Morrison & Smollan, 2020). Despite scholarly work highlighting the

drawbacks of open‐plan offices and hot desking, these physical work environments remain

prevalent and disliked by employees. For instance, a 2016 Gensler workplace survey report

revealed that the majority of workers in the United Kindom worked in open‐plan environments

(Tidd et al., 2016).

Our study challenges the conventional view of the ‘watercooler moment’as a creativity

booster and illustrates that mandated on‐site work can mask the costs to productivity from

frequent arbitrary meetings and audio‐visual distractions at the workplace. Furthermore, we

argue that a significant reason why many staff members prefer hybrid work is the control they

have over their physical work environment. This paper offers two contributions.

Building on empirical studies documenting employee positive attitudes towards flexible

work (Felstead & Henseke, 2017) and aversion towards open‐plan offices (Morrison &

Smollan, 2020; Richardson et al., 2017), we argue that both conventions owe to limited

opportunities for employees to voice their preferences and participate in decision making. Yet,

we note modicums of change. We find that post‐pandemic employee voice on hybrid work

preferences is partially harnessed, while employee voice on the physical working space remains

ignored. Furthermore, we posit that workers' physical working environment shapes flexible

work preferences, and this relationship is also ignored by management practitioners. Office‐

space preferences can push employees away from on‐site working, influencing their hybrid‐

work preferences. This finding suggests that what may appear as a missing voice may better be

described as a latent one, hidden until triggered by wider conditions or informally affecting

other areas of work.

Next, we highlight the function of academic research as an employee voice mechanism.

Empirical studies on employee experiences and preferences, such as remote work or office

space, represent worker voice at the macro, policy, or organisational level. However, academic

research is often an external voice mechanism of low formality, and management practitioners

or policy‐makers may not fully consider it.

The paper is structured as follows: The first section on employee voice serves as a

framework for understanding how organisational imperfections are silenced. The paper then

provides a brief overview of developments in home‐based and hybrid work in the United

Kingdom, followed by a selective review of literature on open‐plan offices and hot‐desking. We

describe the methods employed to collect primary data, move on to data analysis, and conclude

with the discussion and concluding remarks.

2|EMPLOYEE VOICE

Research on employee voice in the past three decades has been extensive, encompassing

various scholarly traditions like employment relations, human resource management, and

organisational behaviour (Wilkinson et al., 2018). According to Dundon et al. (2004),

understanding employee voice involves considering the diverse mechanisms for voice (such as

union recognition, joint consultative committees, attitude surveys, or complaining to line

managers), its purposes (e.g., to rectify a problem with management, provide a countervailing

source of power to management, or seek improvements in the work organisation), and

HYBRID WORK AND OFFICE SPACE DISCONTENT

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