I have found that truly open office plans act as significant discouragers of social contact at the office. Everyone except for the truly oblivious are hyper-awa

I have found that truly open office plans act as significant discouragers of social contact at the office. Everyone except for the truly oblivious are hyper-aware of how any pleasant extraneous conversations they have are being heard by every single other person in the room. With a small team maybe that's not so bad if everyone has good chemistry, but not so with a large team. When everyone has their own office or cube space, people aren't nearly as averse to friendly conversations because there is a sense of moderate privacy there. Additionally, you feel comfortable having social interactions in shared spaces, because you know you have the 'safety' of your private or semi-private cube to return to. My last nightmare of a job was open office with ~100 employees. Even the kitchen was part of the open office, right in the middle, so even during lunch there really was no space where people felt comfortable having any sort of non-work-focused social interaction. I would go weeks without any friendly interactions at all despite being surrounded by people. It got to the point where I would walk out of the office building after 8+ hours onto the busy streets of downtown, and feel alienated/isolated/detached from all of the other people walking around. I was really getting concerned about it because I hadn't made the connection. I mentioned it to my therapist, and she asked me to describe my standard workday, and when I did she said "It's no wonder you feel like this at the end of the day, your working environment sounds like a nightmare." Yet we are supposed to believe that open plans lead to increased collaboration and sharing of ideas.