The only place I've ever seen this done well is at National Instruments in Austin. Working groups get their area cordoned off with high cube walls. I didn't wor

The only place I've ever seen this done well is at National Instruments in Austin. Working groups get their area cordoned off with high cube walls. I didn't work there, so I have no idea how well it functioned. But it looked reasonable to me. It had to be better than the open-plan cube-farm that I worked at. In my old co's cube-farm, they even had a paging system where service/tech-support calls to certain individuals were blasted over the whole building. So, every 5-15 minutes you'd get a (BEEP - "Rick/John/Dale/Pam/etc, line 2" click). The paging-lady was very proper too, so she always used people's first and last name. The HR people & bean-counters loved it because they got to watch everyone (real-time worker productivity analytics!). They never really understood why nothing ever got done on time; or why some people liked to work late, or come in early. It was an old manufacturing business run by bunch of boomers, who hadn't been outside in decades, and who thought they'd made it a big (100 employees!) company (but in my mind it was a parody of). Another funny note, they'd built this place in response to growth, and planned/expected more growth. However, the building (new, purpose built) only had additional floor space for a few more cubes, so when the growth happened, they had to wiggle, shove, & stuff people into every nook and cranny they could find. Well, that was therapeutic.