Communication Issues in Open Plan System: A Case Study of a Law Firm

Running head: ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR
Organizational Behavior
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

1ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR
Introduction
In this case study, communication issues that have taken place due to the open plan
system of a law firm has been discussed. The case study is based on two partners name
Cheetham and Wynne who started their business and eventually evidenced some
communication issues. In the following paragraph few question associated with the issues has
been answered.
1.
a. Identify the reasons for employees resisting the change to an open-plan office
approach.
Several reasons can be pointed out behind the reason some employees of the Law firm are
opposing the open-plan office approach.
1. The open plan approach is not liked by the founder of the law firm Jack and Owen
partly due to their conservative mentality. Besides that they also dislike the unofficial
conversations that they can now more evidently notice due to the open plan approach.
2. Secondly, since the office is multicultural, the choices of the employees are collapsing
and as a result there develops a potential chance of conflict.
3. Several employees feels that it is difficult to conduct personal conversation over
phone since all the employees are able to hear the conversation in the open plan
approach.
4. Some of the employees dislike this system since they were being warned to use social
media platforms for unofficial reasons within the office hours.
5. Some lawyers have complained that they often need to discuss private matters with
clients over the phone and can’t always take the calls in the meeting rooms.

2ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR
6. A good number of the employees feel being unrecognized since during the decision
making session, they were not involved by the management.
7. Finally, unethical gossips about the coworkers that may give rise to conflict or
attrition of skilled coworkers is another major issue faced by employees in the open
plan system.
Besides that, several other potential issues of the open plan approach can be detected. The
high level of interaction that occur in an undivided workplace often makes it difficult for the
employees to concentrate to their work (Armstrong and Taylor 2014). Besides that, the lack
of privacy is another potential issue where computer screens are easily visible from behind
and telephone conversation can be easily overheard.
b. Explain what the partners might have done better to have minimized the
resistance.
In order to minimize the resistance the following steps could have been taken by the
partners. The first thing that could have been done by the partners is to provide a separation
planks so that each and every cubicle can be separated from others. This would have been
prevented the coworkers sitting a adjacent sits to state at the computer screen of an employee.
Thus the privacy associated with the computer screen could have been resolved to a great
extent. Secondly, in order to provide privacy to employees while they are in a conversation a
separate room for conversation with the clients could have been created so that employees
can obtain privacy while conversing over the phone. Besides that, employees could have been
provided with the permission to move out of the office for a certain period of time, for
instance, for 15 mi ns per day so that they can attain personal calls at a isolated place away
from the office premises (Nankervis et al. 2016).