Do I have your attention? I’ll come clean — I don’t actually have very strong feelings about open office floor plans, but with so many people waxing hyperbolic about them, I felt that it was time someone weighed in with a contrarian opinion and matching hyperbole.
DHH’s article above titled “The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea” reduces the open-office decision to the idea that open offices look good to managers signing leases. The idea is that managers would like to parade visitors through a “fun” environment that looks good as a backdrop for media interviews. These managers—so the thinking goes—don’t care what impact open offices have on employees’ work lives because managers don’t live with the decision directly; they simply reap the media benefits. What with their corner offices and travel-heavy schedules. This argument is highly reductive and doesn’t honestly portray the multitude of reasons that companies choose to have open offices. I think I understand one of those reasons.
