Open offices can lead to closed minds

If it was a hotel room would you like to share it with 10-100 of others or rather have your own private space? Same with offices.<p>You are more productive in private offices with shared collaboration spaces rather than open office floor spaces.<p>High rents convinced the world this some how was a good idea.

Anecdote, but having spent years in an open office the amount of emailing and chat happening instead of talking skyrocketed as density increased.<p>Any time anyone spoke everyone else could hear the conversation, so discussions tended to be formal and short. No &quot;how are the kids&quot; or other pleasantries.<p>Meetings would drag on, if only for the added bit of privacy you had in conference rooms.<p>There were some benefits, but overall I&#x27;m not a fan of them.

The science here is pretty clear that remote workers outperform open office workers. With the exception of winner-take-all monopolies and associated &quot;weird&quot; aspects of how they operate, it seems like a services business is much, much better off allowing remote workers from anywhere in a similar timezone &#x2F; language than they are having an office.