Teams can thrive in same room. High cadence communication needs same room (NASA flight control). If the work is not actually about a team delivering value together - concretely, and the only rationale for open space is "hypothetically it would be nice if they collaborated more" open office will create negative multipliers to everything (except facility costs).
The pathology is statistical. On average open offices are bad. Individuals can love and thrive in open offices. I suppose that's why it's so hard to kill them - you can always find a few persons who claim honestly it's the best place for them.
Re:Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere
by sokoloff on Friday April 29, 2022 @04:15AM
(#31202680)
The benefit of open floor plan is very well established: you can get far more employees into a given amount of space (and therefore rent) than you can with cubes or offices.
Nobody has ever proved any benefits to open plan offices. Their pathologies however are well documented e.g. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2017.023...
Teams can thrive in same room. High cadence communication needs same room (NASA flight control). If the work is not actually about a team delivering value together - concretely, and the only rationale for open space is "hypothetically it would be nice if they collaborated more" open office will create negative multipliers to everything (except facility costs).
The pathology is statistical. On average open offices are bad. Individuals can love and thrive in open offices. I suppose that's why it's so hard to kill them - you can always find a few persons who claim honestly it's the best place for them.