Needless to say this is not a vigorously researched opinion piece. She claims open plan leads to more illness because "last flu season took down a succession of

Needless to say this is not a vigorously researched opinion piece. She claims open plan leads to more illness because "last flu season took down a succession of my co-workers like dominoes" -- the epitome of anecdotal evidence. As for the claim that communication's not a problem with private offices. Cornell did a study awhile back that found something interesting. The standard for team collaboration changes depending on whether you have private or open offices. With open plan "frequent communication" means several times a day, often on the fly. But if you have a private office you concept of "frequent" means "several times a week in a scheduled meeting". [1] So that's consistent with private office people saying everything's fine -- because they've lowered their standard for team interaction. Cornell also noted that office workers are usually incentivized to prioritize their personal productivity over team productivity, because compensation is only or mostly tied to the former. That goes a long way towards describing why employees often complain that they can't focus and want to be left alone, while management extolls the virtues of increased team collaboration. Management are the ones that are properly incentivized to balance individual and team productivity. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140615182702/http://iwsp.human.cornell.edu/file_uploads/office_ex2_1238259706.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20140615182702/http://iwsp.human...