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“We need people back in the office for collaboration.”
“Remote work kills culture.”
“Open offices drive innovation.”
But if that were universally true, why do so many people report being more focused at home — and less collaborative in open offices? And why does the evidence refuse to line up neatly with the rhetoric?
When you strip away ideology, nostalgia, and real-estate economics, the research paints a more nuanced picture. One that matters deeply if you’re setting — or subject to — a return-to-work policy.
What open offices were actually meant to do — and what they do instead
Open-plan offices were popularised to:
Reduce costs
Increase visibility
Encourage collaboration
But empirical research has repeatedly shown a paradox.
Face-to-face interaction dropped by roughly 70%, while digital communication increased.
People didn’t collaborate more. They withdrew.
Not because they became antisocial — but because constant visibility changes behaviour. When every conversation is overheard and every movement observed, people manage impressions instead of ideas.
This doesn’t mean offices are “evil.” It means space design alters cognitive load and social risk — often unintentionally.
It is interesting to speculate how often decisions about open plan offices are made by senior leaders who enjoy the benefits of private offices themselves.
Why noise and exposure matter more than managers think
Cognitive psychology has long documented the Irrelevant Speech Effect — the finding that background speech disrupts concentration more than other types of noise.
Your brain is evolutionarily wired to prioritise human voices. You can’t simply “tune them out.”
In open environments, this leads to:
Increased mental fatigue
Lower working-memory performance
Shorter focus intervals
Multiple studies of open-plan offices show that speech noise and lack of acoustic privacy are among the strongest predictors of dissatisfaction and reduced performance.
So when employees say they’re “exhausted” rather than overworked, the cause is often cognitive friction, not task volume.
Remote work didn’t invent focus — but it removed ambient interruption.
Large-scale studies during and after the pandemic show that remote work often:
Increases uninterrupted time for complex tasks
Improves self-reported productivity for knowledge workers
Reduces time lost to low-value interruptions
At the same time, it introduces new challenges:
Fewer spontaneous interactions
Higher coordination overhead
Risk of social isolation without deliberate practices
A two-year study involving thousands of employees found no overall productivity decline from remote work — and in many cases, modest improvements. However, the same research cautions that collaboration becomes more intentional, not automatic.
Remote work doesn’t kill collaboration. It forces organisations to design for it.
The myth of “serendipity” — and what actually enables collaboration
One of the strongest arguments for office mandates is “serendipitous encounters.”
But the evidence suggests:
Open offices reduce unplanned conversations
People avoid sensitive or exploratory discussions in public
Digital tools replace informal talk — not always effectively
True collaboration depends less on proximity and more on:
Psychological safety
Clear goals
Time protected from interruption
Spaces where partial ideas are safe to express
That’s why executives often work behind closed doors — not because they reject collaboration, but because deep thinking and decision-making require insulation.
The contradiction isn’t hypocrisy. It’s unspoken design truth.
Why hybrid models outperform ideological extremes
The strongest evidence now points toward hybrid work as the most resilient model.
Significantly more likely to stay with their employer
Hybrid models work because they acknowledge a simple reality:
Different kinds of work require different cognitive environments.
Strategy, analysis, and writing benefit from quiet and autonomy
Relationship-building and alignment benefit from presence
Creativity benefits from choice, not constant exposure
The failure of many return-to-office policies isn’t that they value offices — it’s that they treat all work as the same kind of work.
Reference: Stanford News (2024)
What smart return-to-work policies get right
Evidence-aligned organisations are shifting from attendance rules to work design.
They ask:
What tasks genuinely benefit from co-location?
Where does deep work actually happen best?
How do we protect focus and connection?
Effective policies typically include:
Quiet zones or private rooms — not just collaboration spaces
Explicit norms for asynchronous communication
Purposeful in-office days tied to outcomes, not optics
Trust measured by results, not visibility
The goal isn’t control. It’s cognitive efficiency.
The real question leaders should be asking
Not:
“How do we get people back?”
But:
“What environment does this work require to be done well?”
When organisations stop designing for surveillance, convenience, or real-estate efficiency — and start designing for human cognition — performance improves naturally.
Remote, office, and hybrid work aren’t competing ideologies. They’re tools.
Used well, they compound advantage. Used poorly, they create friction — no matter where people sit.
Final thought
If your workplace makes collaboration feel performative and focus feel scarce, the problem isn’t your people.
It’s the system you’ve put them in.
If you’d like help designing evidence-based work models, aligning strategy with execution, or translating this research into practical hybrid policies, you can:
Not reliably. Research on office moves to open-plan layouts has found substantial drops in face-to-face interaction, with employees shifting toward email and messaging instead. Open plans can also reduce psychological safety for exploratory or sensitive conversations.
Why do people struggle to focus in noisy offices?
Speech is especially distracting. Cognitive research on the Irrelevant Speech Effect shows that background conversation can disrupt working memory and attention more than non-speech noise, increasing fatigue and reducing deep work capacity.
Does remote work improve deep work?
Often, yes—especially for knowledge work that benefits from long uninterrupted blocks. Remote work can reduce ambient interruptions and unwanted drop-ins, enabling longer periods of focused effort, assuming people also manage home distractions.
Does remote work reduce collaboration and creativity?
It can, unless collaboration is deliberately designed. Remote work typically reduces spontaneous, unplanned interactions and increases coordination overhead, which can affect how quickly ideas spread and teams align.
Is hybrid work better than fully remote or fully in-office?
For many organisations, hybrid is the most robust compromise: in-person time supports relationship-building and alignment, while remote time supports deep work. Evidence from field studies suggests hybrid can maintain productivity and improve retention when implemented thoughtfully.
What makes return-to-office policies work better?
Policies perform best when they focus on outcomes and work design rather than attendance. That means defining which activities benefit from co-location, protecting focus time, enabling asynchronous workflows, and providing quiet zones and private rooms—not only open collaboration areas.
Do walls create silos or focus?
Walls primarily create focus by improving acoustic and visual privacy—critical for deep work. Silos are more often caused by incentives, poor cross-team goals, and weak coordination mechanisms rather than physical partitions alone.
How should leaders decide where work happens?
Start with the work, not ideology. Map tasks to the environment they require: quiet and autonomy for analysis, writing, and strategy; co-location for onboarding, conflict resolution, and high-trust collaboration; and flexible structures that let teams choose the right mode for the job.
About the author
Chris C Fox is an independent business strategy consultant and founder of StratNav. He helps consultants scale their impact, supports C-suite leaders in executing enterprise-wide strategies, and equips founders to grow and adapt with confidence.
👉 Learn more about Chris and his work.
👉 Book a strategy call or try StratNav for free.
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