I will play the devil’s advocate and argue the other side of this opinion. First off, I too dislike open workspaces. But the reason I dislike them has more to

I will play the devil’s advocate and argue the other side of this opinion. First off, I too dislike open workspaces. But the reason I dislike them has more to do with my personality than anything else. Mr. Brooks states that years of research shows that open workspaces are bad for people. I did a little searching on Google Scholar and I found a variety of studies. Some concluded less satisfaction and interaction, others concluded just the opposite. So, there does not seem to be a consensus on whether people like them or hate them or whether. This makes sense to me: people have different likes and dislikes. I frequently visit coffee shops in my semi-retirement, and I always note about half of the customers are usually working on their laptops. This “third place” for work is an informal “open workspace”. Some people need a public setting to get some work done, even when there is noise and distraction. I would guess that coffee shops owe a lot of their daytime business to these kinds of people. Again, this would not be my preference, but to each their own. The wfh trend could be a testament to people’s dislike of open workspaces, but I doubt it. I think it has much more to do with being “out of sight” (eg pajamas) and less commuting time than anything else. If there were neighborhood open workspaces with comfortable surroundings along with free food and beverages, I suspect more than half of wfh proponents would be perfectly happy spending some time in these locations to see friends, visit with clients, work on collaborative projects, etc. Working in the home all of the time isn’t that great, either. So in conclusion, I disagree that open workspaces are uniformly awful. I think Mr. Brooks is being a little dramatic in his opinion piece and that there isn’t substantial data to back up his claims.