> To me, the more pressing question is: why are they still so common? To quote a very cynical and jaded friend of mine, "It increases shareholder value". Yes,

> To me, the more pressing question is: why are they still so common? To quote a very cynical and jaded friend of mine, "It increases shareholder value". Yes, studies show that open plan offices, especially badly-designed open plan offices, hurt knowledge worker productivity. The problem is, knowledge worker productivity is not expressed as a nice, neat number on a balance sheet. Facilities cost is. Thus, when a business gets into the mode of increasing profits by decreasing costs, all they see with respect to this topic is that office space expense. Cue the management bullshit stream about "collaboration", switch to open plans, and watch that number drop. The productivity drop tends to lag, however. Since many executive suites can't see forward past the next earnings report, or backwards past the previous, they see a nice increase in margins for a quarter or two, followed by a drop in revenue, schedule slips, or increasing costs in other areas caused by the open plan switch. They then move on to fixing this "new" problem, not realizing they caused it with their previous "fix".