Freakonomics Radio
Yes, the Open Office Is Terrible — But It Doesn’t Have to Be
It began as a postwar dream for a more collaborative and egalitarian workplace. It has evolved into a nightmare of noise and discomfort. Can the open office be saved, or should we all just be working from home?
If you work in an office, or if you’ve ever worked in an office, there’s a good chance it was an open office.
The open office design has been around for decades, in a variety of forms, and it has been eliciting strong reactions for almost as long. If you are a cynic, you might think an open office is all about cramming the maximum number of employees into the minimum amount of real estate. But you could also imagine that open offices can produce a grand flowering of collaboration and communication and idea-generation.
So is the open office a brilliant concept that we’ve all been falsely maligning? Or a cruel cost-cutting strategy that causes deep emotional scarring in those subjected to it?
The office is such a quintessential emblem of modern society that it may seem it’s been around forever. But of course it hasn’t. Nikil Saval, the author of Cubed: A Secret…
