My concern though is that when companies see an example in which someone deflects on addressing a real need for private space, and externalizes the cost onto the employee (via micromanaged work-from-home), it sets a precedent that further entrenches open plan designs for new offices later on, and also discounts the value of investing to rebuild office dividers and spending to change from an open plan back to offices.
I’ve had fully remote jobs before and jobs where I could generally WFH when needed, but neither option provides a good solution.
If your spouse lives with you, they might need to generate noise at home, especially if there are young children. Or you might just live in a cramped city apartment with no space for a desk, or noisy neighbors, etc.
The point is that this pushes the costs onto the employee: “here, you figure this out.” But providing good tools to get the work done is the employer’s responsibility. WFH solutions let them try to absolve that duty, often without actually resulting in private or quiet space for the worker anyway.
A better proposal might be that an employer will pay the cost to fully rent dedicated private offices at a coworking space, and then let the employees who want offices simply work from that company-rented private office space.
This way the employer bears the costs, and doesn’t view it as “right” to just lob the grenade back at the employees by leaning on WFH as the only possible way to work in a quiet setting.
Most engineering work requires deep focus. So if the office was designed to allow the majority of work to be private, quiet, and deeply focused, but with occasional meetings or break-out social rooms for the dynamic discussions, that would be great.
Instead, it is designed in the wrong-headed, opposite way: all work is embedded into the dynamic, real-time audio distraction stream. You end up needing to compete for conference room reservations, or hide form people, or listen to music when you don't want to, or abuse a work-from-home privilege, just to get work done, because every day you need privacy and quiet for most of the day, and the default setting of the environment disallows it.
I would agree with your comment if the work divide was more 50/50 between work that needs dynamic communication and work that needs privacy.
But that's just not how reality actually functions.
(A separate part of this which irks me is the assumption that employees can (or want to) 'just work from home' to solve it. It externalizes the costs of privacy onto workers with all kinds of trade-offs not in the employees favor. And a lot of companies actually micromanage this option and are bitterly strict about limiting work from home time.)