"Wearing headphones will be treated as insubordination, management wants you participating in conversations". This was only slightly paraphrased from written p

"Wearing headphones will be treated as insubordination, management wants you participating in conversations". This was only slightly paraphrased from written policy at a former workplace. You have to show some political savvy; wearing headphones in a open office is exactly like being noticed playing games on your phone or sleeping while the CEO speaks at gathering, or making a big production of refusing to answer phone calls or questions from certain coworkers. There's a critical distinction of scale; if "they" don't want you working and prefer talking and distraction to the level that they bake it into the physical architecture of the office, that's really bad for the company on a large scale, but on a small scale trying civil disobedience by wearing headphones will just get you fired. Personally on the downside you're better off crashing the company than getting fired and on the upside the people responsible for the large scale operation of the company probably have quiet private offices anyway and aren't going to reward you for fixing the company anyway even if by some miracle you did it. Open offices are literally in the most straightforward sense a declaration the company has no idea what its doing so talking about it is a good first step. Cutting yourself off from that with headphones means they may as well not pay you. Civil disobedience in this case has no positive outcome; ditch the headphones.