WFH + Open plans are great and should generally be encouraged. The open plan facilitates communications and general discussion. I encourage my team to spend at least 3 days a week at work during our 'core' time (12-5pm/MWF). It gets a bit noisy and productivity drops a bit, but team morale is good and there is a lot of cross pollination of ideas and knowledge. The only difficulty I've had is nearby teams haven't adopted this approach (they don't WFH) so we have to be careful about our volume level when we're in the office.
Open Office plans + private breakout rooms is a good compromise for getting the best of both worlds. You have the open communication and serendipity of the OO + the ability to head over to a quiet space when the work requires it.
Kudos to you for allowing folks to WFH! That's a great thing for improving your employees lives.
How do open plan offices facilitate communicating if everyone is wearing headphones with music cracked up all day? And if you're promoting WFH, then pepper should be using something like email or chat, which means that open plan is unnecessary.
And have you actually done any studies to prove that the cross pollination actually harkens, or does anything?
Wearing headphones while in the open space is antithesis to our team. No one does it. Random interruptions at work are expected and even encouraged. I have not done any studies at all except to privately ask the team during 1:1s if they like it, and they do. In this market where engineers are hard to keep, I prioritize morale over productivity.
