Goodbye open office plans and thanks for all the fish : Finally something good about Coronavius

Well, the Coronavirus news isn't all bad. Mostly bad, yes. But not all bad.

You see, the distancing that is probably going to continue with us as normative behavior for some time once our businesses reopen is going to shoot an arrow through the heart of open office plans.

Frank Taylor's vision

If you work in an office environment, you are assuredly aware of the open office plan. The concept of the open office was first proposed in the early 20th Century by Frank Taylor, a mechanical engineer who believed that efficient close packing of employees offered a utopia of sorts. Well, at least if you're paying the real estate bills. Most people I know who have to work in an open office aren't quite as enamored of the approach. As in: They hate them. With a passion. Sadly, for them, the people who make the decisions to have open office plans are usually at the level where these decision-makers "need" an office. In this way, they are like government officials who issue DoAsISayNotAsIDo edicts. How many Congresspeople do you think are on Obamacare?

The idea of open offices or "Taylorism" (and its offshoots) is to have people working in a close-packed configuration without doors or offices. The earliest versions might have hundreds of workers in a single shared space, each with only a few feet of a shared desk, no decorations, nothing to individualize your small plot of earth. Modern approaches have attempted to provide each worker with a little sense of ownership, but retain the openness and close working quarters. Both of which are no-nos in the era of Coronavirus.

Common modern workspace

So will this lead to yet more revisions of the original Taylorism that promise to reduce the spread of the virus (or any virus that comes in subsequent years) but retain the "you're not worth the cost of private space" ethos? Perhaps. But it would seem that in order to provide an open office plan that also is virus certified is probably going to require changes so costly that it may instead move the big wigs (in their offices) to re-embrace things like cubicles or, god forbid, individual offices.

One thing seems relatively certain: The race to see who can brag about the most workers in the smallest amount of office space is probably about over. Frank Taylor, you had a good run.