Fast Company – “After a year and a half of working from home, we’ve all grown accustomed to personalized workspaces and the ability to work from anywhere. While many of us crave the option to work in a professional setting—away from children, partners, and other everyday distractions—the ability to choose one’s workplace has become paramount in the minds of today’s workforce. In its summer/fall 2020 workplace surveys, Gensler found that just over half of U.S. workers and two-thirds of U.K. workers prefer a hybrid model, with respondents indicating that they choose the office for productivity, but prefer home for its convenience and safety—and want the benefits of both. This widespread refusal to return to pre-pandemic office standards can be largely attributed to the failures of the open-office concept, which was designed to foster more collaboration and socialization across company departments, but gave little consideration to the variety of working environments necessary for a comfortable, productive workplace. In 2019, Harvard Business Review tracked both face-to-face and digital interactions at the headquarters of two Fortune 500 companies and found that face-to-face interactions actually dropped by about 70% after open offices were implemented, while online interactions increased. The result? An unhappy workforce in factory rows, increased sick days, and an overall lack of productivity…”