Another company resides on our floor. They have the open office arrangement (not the big cheese- of course- he has his own office). It is a software company. By open, I mean they all work on a long table with no partitioning at all. Both companies share the restroom facilities. Long story short... those folks NEVER interact with each other in the hall. I never see ANY of them smiling or having any kind of spring in their step. It just looks to TOTALLY suck.
Heh, heh, heh. I got my private office with door. F N and his follow-the-latest-trend mentality.
I used to manage an office. We had satellites that worked very well for mental security and comfort of the employees. Imagine a square office area with smaller square enclosed offices at all four corners, a big hallway space on one side to connect with the rest of the office, and that leaves lots of cubbies in between the offices with cozy areas for 2-3 employees to have a desk. There was a lot of cameraderie. In the middles would be work stations, copy machines, filing areas, etc. It really worked.
We also remodeled each dept as soon as the leadership of that dept changed form. Like suddenly 2 co-dept heads or one doing trading, one doing banking, so we’d remake the interior office walls (they looked like real walls but were easy for construction guys to take down and put back up) to fix it.
The sociological / infrastructure part of managing people was kind of fun.