It won't. The push for open-plan spaces was motivated by cost-cutting.
Layouts with many closed offices would cost far more to build, and take up more square footage to host the same number of employees.
At a time where savvy businesses have dropped their commercial leases / gone full remote, and the more conservative / less accepting of change ones are left holding the bag, I would not expect anyone to make big investments into office space.
There have been many studies that have shown that decreased worker productivity and increased sick leave negate any cost savings from open floor plans. Their only benefit is that the my look cool, especially when recruiting junior employees.
Yeah, but it comes out of a different budget, if it's costed for at all; and if it's noticed it's blamed on workshy employees, not a tactical error by management.
See, "shared team spaces" aren't too bad; most development work I've done has been in teams of 2 - 8 people in a SCRUM setting, for that kind of work I think small team sized office spaces are ideal.
I've also worked in a big open space where, while all five teams worked on the same product, each individual team had their own section. But for that one, you could hear the next desk block over talk about football and another block talk about what THEY're working on, which is highly distracting.
Another one was an open office across three floors with a central auditorium (that is, big open central space cutting across all floors), which in theory would be bad but they had enough noise padding and ceiling-high walls / whiteboards between the blocks to not be an issue.
Another one was one where we were asked for input; they initially wanted to make it an open space, but we convinced them to divide it up into rooms instead. They ended up being rooms with glass walls, some matt glass, but that was enough for team privacy and limited noise.
My current spot has a mostly open plan space, but they have heaps of noise padding; felted panels on walls and dividers, in between rows of desks, and desks arranged in groups of 6-8. It's manageable, although unfortunately the walkways are in between the desks so people passing by having conversations is annoying, and the meeting rooms' noise insulation is inadequate. That said, we're only there two days a week so it's manageable.
> The push for open-plan spaces was motivated by cost-cutting.
I think that it was just as motivated by the way you can walk a potential investor (or a worried current investor) through them, and make grand gestures with your arm indicating all of the busy beavers working on making things happen. Then the group can be walked from rockstar ninja to rockstar ninja, looking over shoulders at unintelligible screens, while having smoke blown up their asses.
An open-plan office is primarily a theatrically staged office. 20 years ago I was paid as a temp to sit in one and type random numbers into a noisy electric printing calculator while a random spreadsheet was on the screen. After a few hours, a small group walked in, led by a man who was obviously giving a presentation, with wide gestures of his arms. They were in the room for two or three minutes before being led out. Twenty minutes after they left the room, we were mostly dismissed, except for the younger guys (like me) who were offered a few hours more work moving boxes.
The end of free money might make open plan offices more popular among a certain type of company.
Lots of empty / underutilized offices right now. So costs should be down, which might rip the equation. Recruiting is still a challenge for top positions, an office might be a nice way to attract talent on the cheap.
Estimates I saw said individual offices were not much more expensive compared against the other costs to employ people. But the costs were simpler to quantify than the benefits. Or the benefits were denied. The motivations for open spaces included faith in collaboration or productivity increases. Even when studies found decreases.
The one counter is that commercial real estate is way cheaper than it used to be. The potential savings of putting everyone in a full open floor plan aren't as high as they used to be.
(Still don't think it will happen - but that shift occurred when leases on commercial real estate were at all time high)
To be honest I think with hybrid, open offices make a lot of sense. Realistically you want to be able to hot desk because that's where the cost savings are made in a hybrid situation. You sort of fractional-reserve your office space. Of course it works only so long as nobody calls an in-person all hands.
The in-office days are social collaboration days so it doesn't make sense to keep people in separate boxes for them. Then people's home office setups are their cubes if they want them, which most people seem to.
No, thanks. If you want happy productive desk workers, give them their own desks, their own shelves, and possibly even their own blackboards.
Even ignoring increased happiness, this enables giving employees their own tools: keyboards, chairs, monitors, workstations, tea, oscilloscopes, papers, etc.
Again we're talking about a hybrid situation here where typically the employee is likely to be working from home more than they're in the office. I think what you're suggesting makes sense for 3+ days a week in office situations though but 2 days or less and it starts to get tenuous. And for me I wouldn't want to go in any more than 2 days a week so they can keep the permanent desk imo.
> To be honest I think with hybrid, open offices make a lot of sense. Realistically you want to be able to hot desk because that's where the cost savings are made in a hybrid situation.
This doesn’t sound like a stable equilibrium to me; more like a transition to full remote that you do when you’re waiting for your lease to run out. Not even having your own permanent desk sounds like utter hell.
You said it would make sense for 3 days in office. This seems to be a common hybrid schedule. Some companies assigned shared permanent desks to people with complementary 2 day schedules. This is better than hot desks. And it is possible both of you are right.
We had “hotelling” at Accenture in the early 2000’s and I hated it. It made sense their, because at any moment you could be called to an out of town assignment, but the lack of workspace consistency and the feeling of coming into the most generic workspace available was really draining).
my employer is currently making noises about this, currently 2 days a week from home. I have a source in the process and I'm told that for 2026 they're going to be giving up their current lease, moving to a new smaller location, and requiring people hot desk so you don't even get your own cube.
It's either going to be working from home or a new employer for me.
Do you want to share with us how that belief is incorrect?
It seems downright trivial to me that giving employees 4' desks packed side to side, back to back in rows requires less square footage and no walls, vs. an office.
(And thus, the race for short-term gains in terms of less real estate trumped the long-term gains of SWE being able to think, and the race to the bottom began. It seems to me the costs of open-office are all after the build out: lower morale, higher noise, lower productivity, faster disease transmission, etc.…)
It's trivial to you that a few extra pieces of drywall and a handful of additional planks of wood would launch the cost of a buildout into the stratosphere?
Are you even reading the comments about studies showing the lost productivity (and therefore revenue) caused by open office spaces?
I didn't say it wouldn't cost one penny more than an open office, I said it wasn't wildly different. So many buildouts go halfway already with the tiny "phone rooms"; it's not in any way a budget buster to keep that idea going, except around a central shared space where meetings can take place.
When I consider "the cost of the buildout", I consider that to be the cost to do the buildout, nothing more. Productivity gains/losses are outside the scope of that.
I.e., the claim, as I read it, is that construction of an open office is more expensive than a non-open floorplan, per employee.
(If you consider that, yes, I think open office is the long-term worse option, and the parenthetical in my comment pretty clearly denotes that.)
> I didn't say it wouldn't cost one penny more than an open office, I said it wasn't wildly different.
This still isn't clear to me. An office is probably, what, 10' square, at least? Google thinks, "The North American office size average is currently 150-175 square feet per employee. Open office spaces for tech companies typically use even less at 125-175 square feet per person". That's considerably more room than an open office floorplan, which is probably closer to 4'x4', maybe 4'x5'.
> So many buildouts go halfway already with the tiny "phone rooms"
My company had 3 of those, back to back to back, occupying what like 30–40 sq ft total? That's hardly "halfway".
What you quoted had numbers for open office spaces. It said they were not much smaller than average or the same typically. And the source was a leasing guide. Office meant company office. Not individual office.
Ha, so you're right. That's what I get for trusting AI to answer a question.
That figure absurd in the context of an open office floorplan, and I suspect they're doing some "damned lies" statistics to arrive at it, such as amortizing the common area across the occupancy. I think every open office floorplan I've been in has had 4' desks. The next desk is flush against mine, and there was someone sitting directly behind me. At best, that's 16 sq ft. Generously 20. I have no idea how you arrive at ~150 sq. ft.
I don't really know what you want me to do with this comment. Okay? What part of any of this suddenly exponentially blows up the cost of building many little offices (not average sized offices, unnecessary for this)?
You asked me to justify it, I did, and you replied with a generic moan. Alright?
You do all of that already for buildouts, you're pretending like this isn't a marginal cost question when in reality it is.
And I never said you would retain 100% of the space exactly as it is in an open plan, I said it is not wildly more expensive when you're already building out the floor.
