open-office flex seating is bad

Let's start with the requisite bagging on open-office setups:

Moreover, the increment of overall workspace satisfaction due to the positive impact of ease of interaction in open-plan office layouts failed to offset the decrements by negative impacts of noise and privacy.

- Workspace Satisfaction: The privacy-communication trade-off in open-plan offices (Kim, 2013)

Our systematic review found that, compared with individual offices, shared or open-plan office space is not beneficial to employees’ health, with consistent findings of deleterious effects on staff health, wellbeing and productivity.

- Office design and health: a systematic review (Richardson, 2017)

Workers consistently experienced elevated stress, reduced overall health, decreased job satisfaction, compromised concentration, inadequate privacy, and problematic noise levels. The purported social benefits—enhanced collaboration, improved communication, increased innovation through serendipitous interaction—found minimal empirical support, with most social measures trending negative or showing no association.

- The Hidden Costs of Open-Plan Offices: What Research Reveals About Employee Well-Being and Performance

The findings...suggest that the use of shared offices and open-plan workspace designs may be considered as risk factors for sickness absence.

- The impact of office design on medically certified sickness absence (Nielsen, 2019)

...working in open-plan workplace designs is associated with more negative outcomes on many measures relating to health, satisfaction, productivity, and social relationship...Most studies indicated negative effects on social relationships and interactions.

A Comparison of Psychological and Work Outcomes in Open-Plan and Cellular Office Designs: A Systematic Review (James, 2021)

The research is clear: open-plan offices increase stress and reduce productivity, with unclear (and possibly even negative) impacts on collaboration and interaction. Sick leave, low morale, distraction, and high turnover quickly eat any supposed financial benefit from cramming people into smaller footprints.

I won't belabor that point any further; you can read the several studies and reviews linked above and follow the link tree to read up as much as you like on that. Rather, I'll use this article to talk about some of the unexpected second-order drawbacks of the trend towards open-plan offices with flex seating. Put bluntly, flex seating worsens the downsides of open-plan offices, to the extent that I strongly doubt it saves money when viewed in a holistic lens.

artifacts as water coolers

In a previous job, I was part of the MOVE team tasked with modernizing transportation data software and infrastructure at the City of Toronto. As you can imagine, this was a large undertaking. These datasets are the backbone of safety improvement planning, traffic signal timing, fatal collision investigations, estimation of housing development impact on safety and flow, and countless use cases besides. They span over 40 years of history in a rapidly changing city, and come with a corresponding weight of legacy tools and data quirks.

To understand the technical implications of migration, I created a data journey map. Here it is on the wall:

This diagram shows the flow of data: from sources of truth, through intermediate systems and analysis pipelines, to users via application interfaces, visualizations, dashboards, reports, and open datasets. An accurate data journey map helps digital teams understand and plan for complex changes.

But how do you ensure the map is accurate? To do that, you need feedback from the actual experts whose work depends on the data and systems depicted. We were of course interviewing those experts, but I wanted it to be even easier for them to give feedback. I drew the diagram out on a big whiteboard somewhere highly visible (see above image). I also left a stack of sticky notes and pens in a small holder under a hand-drawn note: "see something wrong? let us know!" Before long, the map was sprouting sticky notes, many of them pointing to systems and processes we hadn't surfaced through interviews. We also started getting foot traffic: the very experts whose feedback we were looking for would drop by to chat, at length, and give us that feedback.

Put simply, the physical artifact was sparking the kind of impromptu collaboration open-office advocates claim to want, more effectively than any open office plan could.

The shame is that, in the workplace of 2026, open office plans too often come with "flex desk" arrangements, where employees do not have assigned seats. Workers are told not to leave personal items at their desks; teams do not have their own areas, and are prevented from using walls and other common spaces to display necessary artifacts.

Other examples of effective physical artifacts I've seen:

• poster-size printouts, e.g. user journey maps, storyboards, printed Miro frames (yes, I've seen this last one actually be useful!)
• walls-of-sticky-notes, e.g. brainstormed ideas, collected user feedback, notes from retros, etc.
• physical kanbans (yes, I've seen a team use this, and to great effect - as a focal point for standups, it got the team talking fluidly about dependencies and blockers.)
• UI mockups, printed out and mounted on walls or foam core boards.

More on the last: my first job out of university was at Facebook. This was in the pre-Cambridge Analytica days, when there was still a sense of excitement and optimism around social media. There was a sense that these new platforms could connect and empower people, rather than suck in their attention and divide them. (I could write another post about that and where it went wrong, but instead I'll just recommend Careless People.)

I remember coming across a room in the lower floor of their Menlo Park campus full of foam core boards, each festooned with printed-out mockups of UI concepts. These boards were extensively annotated: thoughts, feedback, suggested improvements, results of tests, all written up on sticky notes in several different hands. This was one of my first real interactions as a budding engineer with the design process. Not only was it effective at surfacing rich, detailed conversation, but it also inspired at least one person (me!) to look beyond the confines of his own role and be curious about how other digital roles worked. I've never seen a Miro board or Figma file inspire in that way.

bottom-up legibility

One difference between tech companies and digital orgs in non-tech companies is that the former invest much more in tooling. When people hear this, they often think first of developer-oriented tooling: language support, core libraries, API gateways, IDE plugins, and so on. That is where most of the effort goes, but the scale of the effort creates a pervasive mindset around building and improving tools that has spillover benefits for non-developer workflows.

Out of this mindset came the Seat Locator. This tool was a zoomable map that allowed you to search for any employee, find their desk, and understand how to get there, so you could drop by and chat if needed. As I recall, this was a bottom-up effort - possibly even a hackathon project? That was typical of many internal tooling efforts, which grew out of an intensely engineering-driven culture: teams did not need business cases or other formal approvals to create better tools. It was tacitly assumed that good tools were force multipliers with extremely short payback periods. Granted, I was there from 2010 to 2012, and I have no idea if this culture has survived further expansion, the decline of Facebook itself as a platform, the ill-fated rebrand as Meta, or the more recent AI FOMO and comorbid layoff fever.

For this article, though, I'm more interested in what the Seat Locator implies: that each and every employee has a dedicated desk that is theirs. I suppose you could build a version of Seat Locator for the flex-desk open-office workspace, where instead of static person-desk assignments you have people check in at desks each day. This is a bigger feature scope than the fixed-desk alternative, and still doesn't solve the underlying physical problem: if I have no assigned desk and might sit anywhere in a broader area (or further away, if it's especially busy!), others who might want to find me can't learn where I sit over time, but must instead search for me anew for each conversation. Users of this space experience it as atomized, fungible, in an eternal state of nebulous flux.

renegotiation of space

The result is a constant re-negotiation of space. Individuals and teams must contend for the space they need to do their work. A shadow seat time culture pops up: if I get in at 8:30am instead of 9am, maybe I'll get a better desk? And there are always worse desks and better desks: desks where the screen never works (or always does), desks in louder areas (or quieter), desks next to busy walkways (or away from said walkways), desks next to windows that always get screen glare at 3pm (or in more light-protected areas), desks kept at freezing temperature by nearby central air ducts (or in better temperature-controlled areas), and so on. Space is not fungible, and cannot be made so.

For a while, I used Toggl to track time spent on various tasks, reviving a practice from my consulting days. This sort of sousveillance was originally useful for ensuring I spend enough time on my own growth and learning; it wasn't mandated from above, which would be highly unusual for high-trust Danish workplaces (and, sadly, increasingly common in low-trust North American workplaces).

My records show a clear pattern with respect to open-office flex space: every day in office starts with 10-15 min finding a desk, making sure the screen works (and switching when it doesn't!), and setting up equipment. This is often followed by 10-15 min of getting in The Zone, a task made harder by subtly different sensory cues, and highly susceptible to interruption by well-intentioned hallway chatter. I work in office 3 out of 5 days, 1-2 of which will usually have meetings not long after this initial 20-30 min. Here the shadow seat time culture pops up again: if I just get in earlier, maybe I can get some work done before that first meeting? At the end of the day, I unwind this ritual: 10-15 min wrapping up my last task so I can prepare myself to put everything away, 5-10 min actually putting everything away.

Adding it all up, that's 20-30 min, 3x / week more or less wasted on the renegotiation of space inherent to flex seating, on top of the well-researched distractions of open-office seat plans.

why, though?

So why are so many offices moving in this direction? To me, it seems like a COVID-fuelled continuation of the purely financialized thinking behind open-office layouts: flex space = fewer than 1 desk per person = less money on facilities! Ignoring, of course, the further impacts on collaboration, productivity, well-being, and navigability, all of which are real but significantly harder to measure. These impacts almost certainly lead to lower psychological safety, an essential component of high-performing cognitive work, and something that's yet harder again to measure.

In The Score, C. Thi Nyugen speaks about the concept of value capture as the end result of an all-too-common dynamic:

• You care about an outcome - say, providing what employees need for their work at a reasonable cost.
• You establish a metric to measure progress towards that outcome - say, facilities cost per employee.
• You start optimizing for the metric and forget about the outcome - say, by introducing open-plan offices, and then flex seating, and then tracking who uses desks to further optimize your flex ratio, and then...

Value capture is the process by which we substitute reductive quantitative measures for the nuance and complexity of real-world problems. It can be difficult to figure out what people need to be able to work: you have to talk to people, think about what they said, and decide what to do about it! Much easier to just optimize cost.

Overburdened people are particularly susceptible to value capture, as the quantitative measures promise fast, measurable progress as opposed to messy, non-linear discovery: you can measure the thing, see number go up / down as desired, and pretend that you're done so you can move on to the next task in the queue! Add in a culture of ever-accelerating pace and an organizational reflex towards legibility and, well, you get flex desks and employee AI token dashboards and rigid OKR frameworks instead of humane work environments, deep questions about AI outcomes (and tradeoffs), and flexible goals rooted in reality.

For all that I've personally had success in incorporating AI into my workflow in a way I can live with, I do have serious concerns that LLMs are accelerating a shift away from deep, nuanced thought and towards shallow engagement. Value capture and cognitive debt are but two of many harbingers of this shift. On the other hand: I've long said that small teams and organizations can't out-work larger ones, so they have to out-think them. If everyone else gives up on thinking, those small groups that can keep human thought, creativity, and passion in the mix may well have a powerful strategic advantage.