An emotionally intelligent organization is one that cares for and nurtures their people as a family. Therefore, you need to build an office that is like a home, where your employees feel appreciated, cared for, and protected. You need to build a house that enables personal wellbeing through compassion and kindness.

A place that enables trust, empathy, respect, equality, mutuality, and individuality with a corporate culture that is meaningful, flexible, and empowering.

How can your organization modify its offices in a way that benefits employees' wellbeing, the environment, and productivity?

From the following figure, in which office would you feel more happy, comfortable, well, and productive: office A or Office B?

Office A is a worker's worst enemy in terms of wellbeing, productivity, happiness, creativity, and resilience to stress. I know that around the world the tendency is to have open offices like Office A. Nonetheless, open-floor offices with shared working spaces without dividers, instead of fostering collaboration that strengthens relationships between colleagues, lean towards destroying the right environment to enhance creativity, productivity and the wellbeing of the employees. Open offices like the one in Office A are the worst nightmare for introverts to work and shine in. A study from the late 1990s in Canada exposed that after moving to an open office:

• Employee satisfaction, happiness, motivation, and productivity declined
• Attention spans, creativity, and overall output declined
• Stress levels rose
• Co-workers felt distant, dissatisfied, and resentful

Open offices like Office A have high-level noise and interruptions, which makes it very hard to remain focused or regain focus after an interruption. This can affect everything from worker productivity to health.

A very noisy ambiance can damage workers' ability to think and get things done, impairing the ability to recall information and to do basic arithmetic. Multitasking frequently leads to distraction, hence workers who multitask have a much tougher time getting back into their flow after an interruption. Research also shows that the more a worker multitasks, the less he is able to block out distractions, raising his levels of stress and decreasing productivity.

Human beings have the need to feel safe and in a comfortable environment thus, taking away physical divisions is like removing all the boundaries that make humans feel safe and secure when you move all the physical divisions/boundaries from the office the workers feel that they are being attacked and are without any protection. Psychologically, it can be very damaging as the employees feel helpless, unable to control their own environment, not able to decorate their own space, adjust the lighting, have personal objects that are meaningful for them, and so on.

According to a recent study in Denmark, researchers found that people working in open offices, on an average, have 62% more sick days than workers in nonopen offices. That is very compelling evidence that open offices may be one of the worst workplace innovations of the last couple of decades.