I was paying a bit more attention to twitter this morning than usual (I’m hoping I’ll get some feedback on my analysis of citations that I posted yesterday). One thing that blew by was this headline the Washington Post:

"Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace."

which took me back to something that I wrote in 2005, reporting on work done long before.

It seems that Google was ignoring history as well. Unlike them.

There’s been lots more work done since the work I cited in that blog post, for example:

Workers in open-plan offices are more distracted, unfriendly and uncollaborative than those in traditional workplaces, according to the latest industry survey.
Employees who have to share their office with more than two people experience high levels of colleague distrust and form fewer co-worker friendships than those working in single-occupancy offices ...

or this reporting published research:

"...the open-plan proponents' argument that open-plan improves morale and productivity appears to have no basis in the research literature."