Why open-office layouts are bad for employees, bosses, and productivity
The best environment I've ever worked in was a combination open office, private space hybrid. You had your desk, whether you wanted a sitting desk or standing desk, you could choose from either, and you were by default in the open office area. However, surrounding this large room were a dozen or so closed offices where you could pop in and have a meeting or do some coding in private.However, one of the organize-all-the-things guys on the internal operations team once caught me in a coding marathon in one of those offices and sent an email to the entire company "reminding" everyone that those offices were for God-knows-what-he-thought-they-were-for, not for work. So I returned to my ergonomic island and toiled away, surrounded by the noise of a hundred private conversations.I've always thought since then that if that had panned out, that you could choose at any moment if you wanted to be in the open room or in a private room in the perimeter, that would have been the ideal layout.