Olde Hornet
Well-Known Member
Workers Love AirPods Because Employers Stole Their Walls
In the open-plan office, wireless headphones are the new cubicles.
www.theatlantic.com
Once upon a time, offices had walls inside them. They weren’t glass, like the conference rooms of 2019, but were made of drywall, and were usually painted a neutral color, like many of the walls you know and love. Over time, office walls gave way to cubicles. Now, for many office workers, the cubicles are also gone. There are only desks.
If you’re under 40, you might have never experienced the joy of walls at work. In the late 1990s, open offices started to catch on among influential employers—especially those in the booming tech industry. The pitch from designers was twofold: Physically separating employees wasted space (and therefore money), and keeping workers apart was bad for collaboration. Other companies emulated the early adopters. In 2017, a survey estimated that 68 percent of American offices had low or no separation between workers
Now that open offices are the norm, their limitations have become clear. Research indicates that removing partitions is actually much worse for collaborative work and productivity than closed offices ever were. But something as expensive and logistically complicated as an office design is difficult to walk back, so, as Jeff Goldblum wisely intones in Jurassic Park, life finds a way. In offices where there are no walls, millions of workers have embraced a work-around to reclaim a little bit of privacy: wireless headphones.
