The open-plan office experiment has been a disaster. Give us walls now

By now, there’s no debate: the open-plan office has been a failed experiment. Popularised in the ’60s to foster office camaraderie and collaboration, it’s instead done the opposite. People hate offices so much that they’d rather work from their dirty kitchen tables at least two to three times a week.

It’s understandable. Because, at this point, home offers things the open-plan office – the panopticon made real (I read Foucault once) – does not: privacy, efficiency and uninterrupted concentration.

The office is all interruptions and distractions. You’ve got Liam on your left, gabbing endlessly about Manchester United’s latest collapse, and Pammy on your right, detailing whatever crazy dream she had last night. And yes, maybe I did come up with these fictional names while looking at a bus stop poster of the new Naked Gun movie. But my point is that it’s impossible to get any work done at work, because the open-plan office is intrusive and annoying.

But it doesn’t have to be like this. Like the long-gone hot-desking craze of the 2010s, we can admit we were wrong. If upper management wants a solution to the work-from-home epidemic they created, the answer is simple: give everyone a private office.

If I had a private office, I would be so much better at my job (note to my bosses: I am already perfect at my job). I’d be calling people left and right, yelling this and that. “Get me Pitbull on a Zoom now, or else!” I’d scream at incompetent publicists, and then I’d throw my phone against the wall so they knew I meant business.

You can’t work with that level of intensity in an open-plan office. You can barely make a phone call for the lack of privacy, or feeling that your hushest whisper is annoying everyone around you.

Unless you’re a Liam-level sociopath, the open-plan office completely killed the use of telephones at work. These days, anytime a coworker’s mobile rings, they’re immediately scampering off in search of a private room where they can speak without judgement. Of course, there are no private rooms anywhere, which is why so many people end up taking phone calls on the toilet.

I’ve heard it, it’s gross: “Yeah, I’m just sorting that out for you…” – splash! – “I’ll have an update by COB.” No civilised business should run on toilet phone calls. I’m pretty sure this is what the TV show Severance is about (haven’t seen it).

Open-plan offices are also petri dishes for illness and disease. Every time the season changes, your desk mate suddenly starts wheezing and sniffling like a Dickens orphan. If we all had private offices, I don’t think COVID would’ve even caught on. Instead, we had open-plan offices and three years of sick leave. Real smart productivity plan, corporate leaders!

The argument that open-plan offices promote office morale and the sharing of ideas has already been undone. Look around you right now: everyone’s probably wearing headphones in the universal symbol of “leave me alone”. We literally sit next to each other and only chat via Slack. No one’s openly sharing ideas, because no one wants to be the annoying person disturbing everyone else’s work. If anything, we’re just sharing eyeroll emojis about Liam’s latest loud rant.

By this point, I know what you’re thinking: “Your logic is exceptional and you might be a genius. But how can everyone have their own private office? It’d be so expensive and there’s not enough space!”

That’s exactly what your corporate overlords want you to think. But there is space, lots of it. It’s right there above you in that gap between your head and the ceiling. Like a water-cooler Gustave Eiffel, what I’m saying is: “Build up.”

Your desk dimensions hardly need to shift, for what is an office if not merely four walls and a roof? If you’d like, you could build a little window latch on either side so you could still chat to your desk mates if you wanted to. Otherwise, you could always just buzz them in for an office visit and cram in two to three people wide, the way cocaine fiends do in toilet cubicles at yuppie bars.

With a private office, your efficiency would be through the roof. You could create the perfect atmosphere to get you in the ultimate working mood. You could play free-jazz in there, loud. You could light a scented candle. Put up motivational posters. You could even eat sardines for lunch, comfortably. You wouldn’t bother anyone and no one would bother you. You’d get more work done in a day than you currently do in a week of open-plan living. You could do the work of five Liams (not hard, really).

Your bosses know all this to be true. Why do you think they’ve kept their own private offices all this time, instead of joining the rest of us on the virus-infested floor? Why do they get special treatment, alongside their billion-dollar salaries? We have generations of workers who’ve never once had the chance to say: “Step into my office.” We all deserve that right. And we should be willing to kill for it. Ok, I took that too far.

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