We Tore Down The Walls. Now Everyone's Hiding In Meeting Rooms.

You walk into the office and immediately hear your co-workers in the open area talking to – or even talking over – one another. You scan the meeting rooms to find most of them occupied by a single person, not necessarily hosting a meeting – they just needed some quiet alone time to think. This situation may feel familiar; it’s happening in offices everywhere. We tore out the cubicles, knocked down the walls and built temples to collaboration in the office. But if open plan was the answer, why are people quietly retreating to the only enclosed spaces they can find?

Cubicles had a bad reputation – they were bland and isolated workers. But they solved a real problem: the need for a degree of acoustic and visual privacy for focused work. The open plan revolution, which dramatically accelerated post-COVID, was sold on collaboration, creativity, culture, community and mentorship. More progressive organizations had already moved towards open plans long before the COVID-19 pandemic, designing offices with a range of space typologies that catered to different working modes. Tearing down walls was supposed to tear down hierarchy too, but that isn’t what happened…

Instead, noise levels rose, interruptions increased and employees started using headphones to recreate the acoustic bubble that the cubicle, or more recently their home office, provided. However, open floor plans aren’t, in themselves, the problem – the problem is that too many organizations redesigned their offices without getting proper advice on the right mix of spaces for their people. Instead of a thoughtful range of environments, they landed on a default: acres of open-plan desking, a handful of meeting rooms and maybe a few phonebooths spread throughout. This one-size approach doesn’t meet the needs of employees.

Space utilization data from various firms consistently shows meeting rooms being booked for solo work. People aren’t purposefully being selfish or wasteful in doing this, they’re rationally responding to an environment that doesn’t offer any or enough alternatives for focused, private work. Over the past nine years, organizations invested heavily in collaboration infrastructure – such as phone booths, meeting rooms and whiteboards – and employees are using that infrastructure to hide from the open plan office. Activity-based working was meant to solve this by giving employees a range of working options to choose from. But, in practice, many firms underinvested in the quiet, solo-working end of the spectrum relative to the collaborative end. Rather than a space management problem, the booking trends the market has seen are a design feedback loop that few are listening to.

Occupancy sensors and room booking analytics that were deployed to help firms right-size their real estate footprint are surfacing something more interesting: behavioural signals about what employees actually need from a space. Underutilized open plan desks alongside overbooked meeting rooms and over-used phonebooths tells a story about the mismatch between design intent and lived experience. Forward-thinking organizations are now using space management platforms to benchmark utilization continuously and feed that intelligence back in real time, rather than just using occupancy data to inform one-off redesign projects. Decision-makers are then utilizing these platforms to continuously redesign workplaces, rebalancing the ratio of collaborative vs. focus-first environments as needs evolve. This is exactly the kind of insight that good space management tech should be surfacing for FM and real estate teams.

Nobody is seriously suggesting we bring back the sea of grey cubicles. But the pendulum has swung too far and the evidence is hiding in plain sight in every booking system. Real estate and facilities teams should ask themselves “why aren't people using the open floorplan, and what does that tell us?” not “how do we get people to use the open plan space?”.

The cubicle was never really about the cubicle. It was about having somewhere to think. Turns out – big surprise – people still need that. Frameworks such as the WELL Building Standard have long recognized this, embedding acoustic comfort and access to quiet spaces as core criteria for healthy workplaces.

For more insights into the future of offices and technology offerings for workplaces, check out Verdantix’s Future Of Office Space (North America) and Buyer’s Guide: Hybrid Workplace Solutions (2025).