Why open-plan offices are a disaster for your company

Before COVID-19, open-plan offices were on the rise. Facebook's new Menlo Park headquarters boasted the "largest open floor plan in the world," for example.The open-plan office obsession, which probably peaked around ten years ago, was based on what I've called "collaboration bias" — the under-examined assumption that ad-hoc social encounters are more valuable for business, creativity, and productivity than un-interrupted "deep work."But a series of recent surveys shed new light on the mi