Are open plan office environments productive?

Many of us know the feeling of working in busy open plan offices, people trashing back and forth, the office loud mouth chattering to her colleagues about her drunken weekend antics, your boss facing you or worse, peering over your shoulder while you work… does this environment really breed productivity? Then you have those people who think it is important to talk so loudly about what they are working on, just so that everyone is aware of how 'busy' they are and how hard they work.

Back in the 80’s the trend was to have office cubicles, places where each person could sit quietly and get on with their work. This was also unproductive, no-one was expected to talk and it resulted in high levels of boredom and absenteeism. 

But what I would give for a bit of peace and quiet right now... Here I am sat in an office full of about 300 people and there is nowhere to escape. Even if you can find a quiet corner, everyone sees you go there and keeps a record of how long you stay there. Only the other day I was talking to a friend about her experiences of the office toilet habits. Everyone in the office knows the time you go and length of time you spend on the throne and they then judge whether or not it is safe to go afterwards! My friend, who will rename unnamed, now has a complex about her toilet habits!

Is this really caring for our workers? Have we gone ‘open plan, shove them in like cattle’ mad?!

The modern office means that not only have we got more desks per square meter than spotlights, there is also the small, but super trendy, matter of hot-desking. That is desks that are assigned to anyone who can grab them before the next person. For those people who don’t spend every day in the office, why bother giving them their own desk… let them find some space and if there is none, tough! If you manage to find a desk, then you have to put up with working from a minuscule laptop, uninviting strip lighting and defiantly bad ergonomics. Is it just me or have we gone backwards?! The industrial revolution brought us small tightly packed offices where production was key, no thought for worker welfare. The scenarios described above hinge on similar levels of treatment.

But differently personalities suit different environments. Some people like the busy buzzy office environments, chit chat with their colleagues, I prefer to keep a professional distance most of the time, it takes time to develop relationships, and trusting people in the workplace is, in my view, difficult.

So where is the middle ground? How should our offices be laid out? And is it only me that struggles with this? I'd love to hear your views...