Going beyond the open-closed office dichotomy

An online search about office layout will give thousands of links to different articles lauding or scoring the merits of open offices and – by extension –closed offices. Open offices refers to layouts where a number of employees are placed in a large, open space without any form of physical boundary between their respective work spaces. Generally, each employee will have his or her desk, and possibly a low partition to demarcate the desk's/workspace's boundary. Closed office refers to a layout where employees are spread into different smallish rooms or cubicles. Over the last years, the concept of open office made huge strides internationally, in particular thanks to a strong tailwind in the form of it being adopted as the layout of choice by a number of major technical companies from Silicon Valley (such as Google, Apple, Facebook and Pixar to name but a few), and having such companies singing its merits. However, a backlash of sorts has resulted in thousands of criticisms to the concept itself, with 'experts' arguing that the open office has had its heyday and is now on the wane as a concept as firms are recognising its drawbacks and going back to the drawing board. Reading...

from timesofmalta.com http://ift.tt/1WMyfXX
via IFTTT