>1) If it works for some of the most successful tech companies on the planet (Google / Facebook / Amazon,) why can't it work for us? The open floor plans hurt

>1) If it works for some of the most successful tech companies on the planet (Google / Facebook / Amazon,) why can't it work for us? The open floor plans hurt their expensive worker's productivity, but they have the money to hire more people. A small company has to be more worried about worker productivity than a large mega corp. >...2) Prove to me that the loss in productivity is higher than the cost / investment necessary to build everyone an office (or a semi-isolated cube) + value gained from collaboration. There is pretty much overwhelming research that people are more productive and healthy at work when they have some privacy and don't have distractions. One example - a study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology of more than 40,000 workers in 300 US office buildings: "...Enclosed private offices clearly outperformed open-plan layouts in most aspects of IEQ (Indoor Environmental Quality), particularly in acoustics, privacy and the proxemics issues. Benefits of enhanced 'ease of interaction' were smaller than the penalties of increased noise level and decreased privacy resulting from open-plan office configuration." https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/science-just-proved-that-open-plan-offices-destroy-productivity.html https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/science-just-proved-that-... This article talks about some of the other research on the negative health effects and other effects on productivity: https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-open-office-trap https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-open-office-... Even the idea that there is any actual "value gained from collaboration" in an open floor plan is questionable and anyone claiming it should show some evidence for it. In a large company, the issues always seem to be between teams, not inside the individual teams. An open floor plan lets you hear every random conversations in your own team, but it really discourages people from going to another teams area to ask a casual question or have an impromptu discussion of what they are working on since they know they would be disrupting several people. The best environments I have seen are when there are individual offices with plenty of open areas and conference rooms for people to meet.