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
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…