Do open-plan offices help or harm the way people work?

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Few workplace changes have been adopted as widely, or resented as quietly, as the open-plan office. Both views have evidence behind them, but on balance I believe the harm outweighs the benefit for most kinds of work. Supporters argue that removing walls removes barriers. A junior designer who overhears a client call learns faster than one who does not, and a question that would have become an email gets answered across a desk in seconds. Open layouts also cost less per employee, freeing money for other things, and they make teams visible to one another in a way that a corridor of closed doors never does. The evidence on the other side is nonetheless substantial. Studies that measured communication before and after the walls came down found face to face interaction falling rather than rising, as employees defended their attention with headphones and messaging apps. That is the central problem: concentration is a limited resource and interruption is expensive. Work demanding sustained thought, such as writing, analysis or programming, suffers most, and those are precisely the tasks companies claim to value. The sensible conclusion is not a return to private rooms for everyone. Offices that work well are mixed: open areas for collaborative work, quiet rooms that are genuinely quiet, and a culture that treats an uninterrupted hour as normal rather than antisocial. In conclusion, open-plan offices deliver savings and visibility while quietly taxing the deepest work an organisation does. Until an office makes it as easy to think as it is to talk, the design harms more than it helps.