Open plan

Based on Wikipedia: Open plan

The Expensive Illusion of Collaboration

Here's a paradox that should trouble every executive who has ever approved an office renovation: open-plan offices were designed to increase face-to-face collaboration, but they actually reduce it. Dramatically. When walls come down, employees don't talk more—they talk less. They retreat into headphones, send more emails, and type Slack messages to colleagues sitting ten feet away.

The open office is one of the great self-defeating ideas in modern workplace design. Companies tear down walls to save money on construction and foster teamwork, then watch productivity drop by as much as two-thirds while their employees get sick 160% more often than workers in private offices.

How did we get here?

A Brief History of Putting People in Rooms Together

The open-plan office isn't a modern invention. Before the 1950s, large open floors filled with rows of desks were common—but they weren't designed for collaboration. They were designed for surveillance and efficiency. Picture a factory floor, but for paperwork. Clerks sat in neat rows, typing or filing, while supervisors could scan the entire operation at a glance. The intellectual godfather of this arrangement was Frederick Winslow Taylor, the pioneer of "scientific management," whose time-motion studies treated workers like components in a machine. Henry Ford applied similar thinking to manufacturing. The open clerical floor was their vision applied to white-collar work.

Then came the Germans.

In the 1950s, a consulting group called Quickborner (named after a town near Hamburg) developed something they called the "office landscape." Instead of rigid rows, they proposed curved screens, clusters of desks at organic angles, and large potted plants scattered throughout. The idea was to create natural work groups—people who needed to collaborate could sit together, while the plants and screens provided some visual separation.

It was a genuine attempt to humanize the office. It didn't last.

American furniture companies saw an opportunity. They took the open-floor concept but replaced the organic curves with something more profitable: the cubicle. Suddenly you could pack more workers into the same square footage while still giving each person a nominal sense of territory. The cubicle farm was born.

The Cubicle's Strange Journey

The cubicle deserves its own brief digression, because its origin story is almost comically ironic. Robert Propst, the designer who created the first cubicle system for Herman Miller in 1967, called it the "Action Office." His vision was liberating: give workers flexible, reconfigurable spaces with multiple work surfaces at different heights. Standing desks. Privacy when needed, openness when desired.

What actually happened was that companies took his modular panels and used them to create the smallest, cheapest enclosures possible. Propst watched his invention mutate into the soul-crushing cube farms of "Office Space" and "Dilbert." Before he died in 2000, he called the modern cubicle "monolithic insanity."

But even the much-maligned cubicle provides more privacy than what came next.

The Rise of the "Collaborative" Open Plan

Starting in the late 1990s and accelerating through the 2000s, a new philosophy took hold. Cubicles were out. Walls were definitely out. The new ideal was radical openness—long tables, no barriers, everyone visible to everyone else at all times. Silicon Valley led the charge, with companies like Google and Facebook building cavernous open floors packed with engineers.

The stated rationale was collaboration. If people can see each other, they'll talk to each other. If they can overhear conversations, they'll learn things and contribute ideas. Information silos would dissolve. Hierarchies would flatten. The collective intelligence of the group would rise.

Michael Bloomberg became perhaps the most prominent evangelist for this approach. At his media company Bloomberg L.P., he implemented what he called a "bullpen" style—desks grouped into teams, everyone visible, no private offices including for himself. When he became Mayor of New York City in 2002, he famously replicated this setup at City Hall, installing himself at a desk in the middle of his staff rather than in the traditional mayoral office.

The message was clear: openness equals collaboration equals productivity equals success.

The only problem was that almost none of this turned out to be true.

What the Research Actually Shows

When researchers began systematically studying open-plan offices, they found something counterintuitive. In open environments, face-to-face interaction doesn't increase. It drops—sometimes by as much as 70%.

Why? Because humans are social creatures with a strong need for privacy and autonomy. When you can be seen and heard by dozens of people at any moment, you become more guarded, not less. You don't want to bother the person next to you. You don't want everyone to overhear your phone call. You don't want to be judged for chatting when you should be working.

So you put on headphones. You send an email instead of walking over. You save your real thoughts for the conference room or the coffee shop or the Slack DM where at least you have some control over who's listening.

The noise is relentless. Studies have found that workers in open offices are constantly interrupted—not just by direct conversations, but by the ambient chatter of nearby discussions, ringing phones, typing, and all the other sounds that dozens of humans make in close proximity. One study estimated that this auditory distraction reduces productivity to roughly one-third of what the same workers would achieve in quiet private spaces.

Think about that number. Two-thirds of productive capacity, gone. Evaporated into the noise.

The Sickness Problem

Beyond the productivity question, there's a simpler physical reality: when you put more people in a room together, diseases spread faster.

Workers in open offices with more than six people take over 160% as many sick days as workers in private offices. That's not a subtle statistical effect. It's a dramatic difference that shows up year after year in study after study.

The mechanism is straightforward. When someone in a private office catches a cold, they might infect one or two colleagues they meet in the hallway or the break room. When someone in an open office catches a cold, they're exhaling into air that dozens of people breathe all day long. They're touching shared surfaces. They're coughing within feet of their neighbors.

This was always a cost that companies quietly absorbed. Then came COVID-19.

The pandemic made the disease-spreading properties of open offices impossible to ignore. Respiratory diseases thrive in exactly the conditions that open offices create: lots of people, close together, breathing the same air for extended periods. Suddenly the abstract risk of "more sick days" became a concrete question of whether open offices were even safe to occupy at all.

The Psychological Cost

Research has documented a constellation of negative psychological effects from open-plan offices. Higher stress. More conflict between coworkers. Lower job satisfaction. Reduced ability to concentrate. Higher blood pressure. Higher staff turnover.

That last one deserves emphasis. When your office design increases turnover, you're not just making people uncomfortable—you're incurring enormous costs in recruiting, hiring, and training replacements. The average cost to replace a professional employee runs somewhere between 50% and 200% of their annual salary, depending on the role. If your open office drives away even a few extra people per year, the construction savings evaporate quickly.

There's also the subtle cost of ideas not shared. In open offices, employees are less likely to speak their minds, even on phone calls. They worry about being overheard. They worry about being judged. They worry about distracting the person at the next desk. So they stay quiet, and the organization loses the benefit of their perspective.

The Residential Parallel

Interestingly, a similar pattern has played out in home design. The "open concept" floor plan—where the kitchen, living room, and dining room flow together as one large space—became enormously popular in American homes starting in the 1970s. The appeal was similar to open offices: togetherness, visibility, the feeling of spaciousness.

This wasn't entirely new. As early as the 1880s, middle-class suburban homes were replacing small specialized parlors with larger multi-purpose rooms. Walls became archways. The formal sitting room merged with the informal living room. Frank Lloyd Wright championed this approach, arguing that open kitchens would let housewives participate in the social life of the home rather than being trapped behind closed doors like "kitchen mechanics."

But by the late 2010s, the backlash had begun. Homeowners discovered the downsides of openness: noise travels everywhere, cooking smells permeate the living space, there's nowhere to hide clutter, and different family members can't easily do different activities at the same time. A television in the living room competes with conversation in the kitchen. A teenager's homework competes with a toddler's play.

A telling trend emerged among wealthy homeowners: the "mess kitchen." This is a second, smaller kitchen where actual cooking takes place—chopping, sautéing, washing dishes—while the visible open-plan kitchen stays clean for entertaining. In other words, the solution to the problems of openness was to recreate the closed-off kitchen that openness was supposed to replace.

What Actually Works

The research suggests that the best office designs aren't purely open or purely closed. They're flexible. They provide different spaces for different activities: quiet rooms for focused work, open areas for casual interaction, enclosed spaces for confidential conversations, team rooms for collaborative projects.

This is sometimes called "activity-based working." Instead of assigning every employee a permanent desk in an open sea, you provide a variety of spaces and let people choose what suits their current task. Need to concentrate? Find a quiet pod. Need to brainstorm? Grab a whiteboard room. Need to make a private phone call? Use a phone booth enclosure.

Materials matter too. Hard surfaces bounce sound around; acoustic panels and soft furnishings absorb it. Strategic placement of sound-masking systems—which emit a subtle background hum—can make conversations less intelligible at a distance, preserving both privacy and concentration. Plants aren't just decorative; they absorb some sound and provide visual barriers that give a sense of personal space.

The German office landscapers of the 1950s had some of these intuitions. Their curved screens and potted plants weren't random aesthetic choices—they were attempts to provide variety and buffering in an open environment. The mistake was thinking that furniture companies and cost-cutting executives would preserve those nuances when implementing the concept.

The Hot Desking Question

A related trend that accelerated with the rise of remote work is "hot desking" or "hoteling"—systems where employees don't have assigned desks at all. Instead, they reserve or claim a workspace when they come to the office, potentially sitting somewhere different each day.

The appeal is obvious: if employees only come to the office two or three days a week, why maintain a dedicated desk for each of them? Hot desking can dramatically reduce the amount of office space a company needs to lease.

But it comes with its own costs. Employees lose the personalization and sense of ownership that comes with having "their" space. They spend time each day finding and setting up at a workspace. They may not sit near the colleagues they work with most closely. Research has found that men working in flex spaces have significantly higher rates of short-term illness—possibly because they're exposed to more varied disease vectors than workers who sit in the same place every day.

There's also an equity dimension. In a hot desking system, who gets the good spots? The early arrivers? The more aggressive? The senior? These questions don't arise when everyone has an assigned space.

Why the Myth Persists

Given all this evidence, why do companies keep building open offices?

The cynical answer is that they save money on construction. Walls, doors, and individual rooms cost more to build than long open floors. Real estate is expensive, and cramming more people into less space reduces the cost per employee. The productivity losses are diffuse and hard to measure; the construction savings are immediate and obvious on a spreadsheet.

There's also a status element. Open offices have been associated with innovative companies—the Googles and Facebooks that shaped the popular image of tech success. A startup building private offices might seem old-fashioned, hierarchical, insufficiently "agile." The open plan became a signifier of a certain kind of corporate culture, whether or not it actually produced the collaboration it symbolized.

And there's genuine idealism in some cases. Executives who believe in transparency and flat hierarchies see the open office as embodying those values. Michael Bloomberg's bullpen wasn't just cost-cutting; it was a statement about accessibility and egalitarianism. If the CEO doesn't have a private office, the symbolism is powerful even if the productivity research is discouraging.

The Post-Pandemic Reckoning

COVID-19 may have finally punctured the open-office consensus. When employees proved they could work productively from home—where they had control over their environment, freedom from interruption, and no risk of catching a colleague's respiratory infection—the arguments for open offices became harder to sustain.

Companies that want employees back in the office now face a harder sell. Workers have experienced the alternative. They know what it's like to spend a focused morning without someone's speakerphone conversation drilling into their concentration. They know what it's like to work without getting sick every time a flu goes around.

The offices that bring people back will likely need to offer something home doesn't: genuine collaboration spaces, high-quality meeting rooms, social interaction, a change of scenery. What they probably shouldn't offer is worse conditions for focused work than a home spare bedroom.

The open-plan office was an experiment that lasted several decades and accumulated a substantial body of evidence. That evidence suggests the experiment failed. People work better, stay healthier, think more clearly, and collaborate more effectively when they have some walls around them.

The oldest buildings in the world have rooms. There might be a reason for that.