The single most important motivation for open offices is cost. The facilities department inside almost every company is viewed as a cost, and managers of departments viewed as a cost have only one way to make a bonus: cut costs. Most of the facilities costs are a multiple of the square meters (rent, cleaning, heating, ...), so to cut costs you cut square meters. How do you do this most easily? Get rid of walls first (open office), get rid of fixed desks second (flexdesk / hot desk), then keep reducing the ratio of desks to staff and push people to work from starbucks. Of course, it’s always packaged up as an enabling story, creating better workplaces, but in almost all cases that I saw the core driver was cost.

To get back to private offices the facilities department needs to be seen as an investment, with higher productivity as ROI. The trick is proving that with numbers. Reducing square meters is so much easier.