Can no one save us from the open-plan office?

If companies inflict this woe then they must observe some rules to help workers survive

Qube, 90 Whitfield Street,Office, Architect London, Hok Offices, Hok Architects, The Qube Building, 90 Whitfield Street, London, Uk, 2009. Aerial View Of People Working On The Ground Floor Open Plan Seating Area — Photo by View Pictures/UIG via Getty Images

By Pilita Clark

This week I discovered three new things.

The battery life on the latest Apple MacBook Pro laptop is not bad. A British man on a stag do has swum across the Hoover Dam, and it is easier than you think to sit on a big inflated ball all day instead of a chair. I did not intend to learn any of this. But I sit in an open-plan office, as I have for most of my working life, and these subjects are what my colleagues and I have been talking about this week.

When open-plan fans gush about the creative exchange of ideas unleashed when workers share a desk, I am fairly sure this is not what they have in mind. I am even more sure that a lot of my colleagues would swap their desks for an office with a door in an instant, especially if they sit near someone like me: easily distracted, sometimes loud and prone to pester people for a chat whenever I feel like it.

The dispiriting nature of the open-plan office has arisen, over canapés, at three events I attended in the past two weeks in London, where a surprisingly large number of organisations seem to be on the move. Bloomberg is shifting to a new building not far from the…