I suspect for something like this to happen, the upper levels of management needs to understand the individual contributor better. I've worked now for some very large companies, and, most of them simply do not think about individual productivity at all. To them, this is simply "not their problem". Instead, it's something for the manager that directly interacts with the individual to deal with.

The problem is, you might have one team agree to this, and others not. But how many companies would let one team take control over their physical space? Very few places I know of would even let a lower-level manager relocate people together.

Problems of our working culture somehow seems tied to our hierarchies and specialties. We don't really give individual teams the budget to go find their own space; instead, it's all specialists who have very little interaction (and often zero insight) with individual contributors.

I wonder if companies should be more organized where teams were "mini-businesses". Instead of worrying about setting up one giant space, it was up to the team, with their own support staff (and budget) to figure everything like their working standards up. I suspect that would change culture quite a bit, mostly, because there wouldn't be this weird "this is the way we do things here because there's this massive team nobody interacts with" wall. Instead, if the team felt like they could do things better, they just do it.

My gut is telling me remote work will upend a bunch of things, because workers will feel more empowered.