"In the 15 days before the office redesign, participants accumulated an average of around 5.8 hours of face-to-face interaction per person per day. After the switch to the open layout, the same participants dropped to around 1.7 hours of face-to-face interaction per day."<p>Maybe it's because what used to take 3 hour meetings to settle, now took 3 minutes of talking with the guy next to you?<p>"productivity, as defined by the metrics used by their internal performance management system, had declined after the redesign to eliminate spatial boundaries.”"<p>Maybe their metrics are wrong? Maybe they measured lines of code written, and maybe they used to do busywork writing lines of code that weren't really needed, and now they're actually able to get things done? They don't say anything about their metrics and expect us to trust that they were just less productive.