"and oh....it turns out open offices will save us $5m a year in facilities costs." is usually delivered at the end, when nobody is paying attention anymore, because it was preceded by "free snacks at every 25th cube!" and "will allow you to configure seating to keep your team near you"
For work that requires lots of talking (or not lots of deep thinking), they work "ok", but for knowledge work, they're basically the worst idea ever conceived outside of sending all your coders to rock concerts all work day and wondering why nothing is getting done.
Where I work, most people get or split offices, but we can work in a few other places, including an open work area. Most people hate working there because it will inevitably have somebody on speaker phone having an argument with their health insurance over an unpaid bill, and that conversation will go on for 2 or 3 weeks solid. Appeals to management have basically been ignored, and now we're getting ready to move to a new facility that's all open space.
It's a little OT, but do you have some real data to back this up? This argument came up a lot in discussions about light bulbs and fluorescent lamps, but in reality cost of fluorescent lamp is around 1% of its lifetime energy consumption. I highly doubt that solar panels cost more energy to produce than 10% of their lifetime output, even in such poor conditions as England.
Subsidies etc. are a different matter, because then you're talking about competing with other sources and the strawman argument "it costs more energy to produce than it saves" doesn't work.
Surely you have an empty conference room somewhere
It's not just that tho, even people who move they ass to talk to someone else usualy /stand/ by that someone else, so instead of having a quiet head-to-head, it always become a 'broadcast'.
I know that they could at least have signs saying 'quiet space' and all that, but that would fly in the face of the idea they have that it 'improves communication'. It's blatantly false, I have no friggin' clue what 80% of the people are doing in this office anyway...
I'm in an open space too, so I definitely feel your pain.
In the offices where I'm at now though, conference rooms have become the quiet spaces though. Life imitating HN comments I guess ;)
My firm moved me to a shared office for 6 months (finally I got my solo office back last month). They had that policy. "Oh for conference calls just use this admin office we set up." But nobody ever used it.
That's a huge "FUCK YOU" to your employee. The company is cheaping out and then making your job harder by forcing you to relocate.
And it plain just doesn't work. If a guy I'm working with calls with a quick question, what am I supposed to do? Call back?
Go on, show your working.
That's a problem. If he's in an open area, let alone an office where people are trying to work, he shouldn't do that.
Solve them problem of 'him' and maybe open offices will be less distracting?
It's like people who buy solar panels in north england; they think it gives them 'free' energy and they are being 'green', while ignoring completely the carbon footprint of making that panel in the first place; while that panel will /never/ repay itself with the energy it harvests.
Going back to open offices (and I'm typing this from one!) I think it's a disaster. There are days when all I can really do is read HN, as there's about 3 loud conversations within 5 meters of me, including one Italian guy who's yelling into his skype microphone.