If all of this results in an office layout revolution that includes many individual offices opening into shared team spaces, I am 100% here for it.
Layouts with many closed offices would cost far more to build, and take up more square footage to host the same number of employees.
At a time where savvy businesses have dropped their commercial leases / gone full remote, and the more conservative / less accepting of change ones are left holding the bag, I would not expect anyone to make big investments into office space.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90285582/everyone-hates-open-pla...
I've also worked in a big open space where, while all five teams worked on the same product, each individual team had their own section. But for that one, you could hear the next desk block over talk about football and another block talk about what THEY're working on, which is highly distracting.
Another one was an open office across three floors with a central auditorium (that is, big open central space cutting across all floors), which in theory would be bad but they had enough noise padding and ceiling-high walls / whiteboards between the blocks to not be an issue.
Another one was one where we were asked for input; they initially wanted to make it an open space, but we convinced them to divide it up into rooms instead. They ended up being rooms with glass walls, some matt glass, but that was enough for team privacy and limited noise.
My current spot has a mostly open plan space, but they have heaps of noise padding; felted panels on walls and dividers, in between rows of desks, and desks arranged in groups of 6-8. It's manageable, although unfortunately the walkways are in between the desks so people passing by having conversations is annoying, and the meeting rooms' noise insulation is inadequate. That said, we're only there two days a week so it's manageable.
I think that it was just as motivated by the way you can walk a potential investor (or a worried current investor) through them, and make grand gestures with your arm indicating all of the busy beavers working on making things happen. Then the group can be walked from rockstar ninja to rockstar ninja, looking over shoulders at unintelligible screens, while having smoke blown up their asses.
An open-plan office is primarily a theatrically staged office. 20 years ago I was paid as a temp to sit in one and type random numbers into a noisy electric printing calculator while a random spreadsheet was on the screen. After a few hours, a small group walked in, led by a man who was obviously giving a presentation, with wide gestures of his arms. They were in the room for two or three minutes before being led out. Twenty minutes after they left the room, we were mostly dismissed, except for the younger guys (like me) who were offered a few hours more work moving boxes.
The end of free money might make open plan offices more popular among a certain type of company.
https://news.yahoo.com/activate-space-wework-founder-adam-18...
(Still don't think it will happen - but that shift occurred when leases on commercial real estate were at all time high)
The in-office days are social collaboration days so it doesn't make sense to keep people in separate boxes for them. Then people's home office setups are their cubes if they want them, which most people seem to.
Even ignoring increased happiness, this enables giving employees their own tools: keyboards, chairs, monitors, workstations, tea, oscilloscopes, papers, etc.
This doesn’t sound like a stable equilibrium to me; more like a transition to full remote that you do when you’re waiting for your lease to run out. Not even having your own permanent desk sounds like utter hell.
It's either going to be working from home or a new employer for me.
It seems downright trivial to me that giving employees 4' desks packed side to side, back to back in rows requires less square footage and no walls, vs. an office.
(And thus, the race for short-term gains in terms of less real estate trumped the long-term gains of SWE being able to think, and the race to the bottom began. It seems to me the costs of open-office are all after the build out: lower morale, higher noise, lower productivity, faster disease transmission, etc.…)
Are you even reading the comments about studies showing the lost productivity (and therefore revenue) caused by open office spaces?
I didn't say it wouldn't cost one penny more than an open office, I said it wasn't wildly different. So many buildouts go halfway already with the tiny "phone rooms"; it's not in any way a budget buster to keep that idea going, except around a central shared space where meetings can take place.
I.e., the claim, as I read it, is that construction of an open office is more expensive than a non-open floorplan, per employee.
(If you consider that, yes, I think open office is the long-term worse option, and the parenthetical in my comment pretty clearly denotes that.)
> I didn't say it wouldn't cost one penny more than an open office, I said it wasn't wildly different.
This still isn't clear to me. An office is probably, what, 10' square, at least? Google thinks, "The North American office size average is currently 150-175 square feet per employee. Open office spaces for tech companies typically use even less at 125-175 square feet per person". That's considerably more room than an open office floorplan, which is probably closer to 4'x4', maybe 4'x5'.
> So many buildouts go halfway already with the tiny "phone rooms"
My company had 3 of those, back to back to back, occupying what like 30–40 sq ft total? That's hardly "halfway".
That figure absurd in the context of an open office floorplan, and I suspect they're doing some "damned lies" statistics to arrive at it, such as amortizing the common area across the occupancy. I think every open office floorplan I've been in has had 4' desks. The next desk is flush against mine, and there was someone sitting directly behind me. At best, that's 16 sq ft. Generously 20. I have no idea how you arrive at ~150 sq. ft.
You asked me to justify it, I did, and you replied with a generic moan. Alright?