I agree with you @manan, there is a sense of belonging to a community when there are more common areas in office - be it for dining, gathering, playing or just hanging out. This communal nature has a positive effect on team's culture. To give a non-work analogy, can we imagine living in an apartment with just houses? and no other common amenities and recreation? what kind of life would that be? So why should work-place be treated any different than our living-space.
However during re-design by contractors, an open office is often thought more from an increase in capacity utilization per sft (which defeats the purpose), it can be much more than that. Being cognizant of the needs of the occupants, groups and their nature of work is key to a successful open plan design.
There are some studies on office space and design, having an impact on the knowledge workers productivity and creativity. Here is one article from HBR exploring the Tech workspaces.
The above answer was written by a member of the community in response to a question.
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Mananpro
Commented 03 Mar, 2022
Thank you for sharing those insights and the HBR article. That non-work analogy really drives the point home.
Keeping with the need to be cognisant of how we design physical workspaces, I wonder how that translates to digital workspaces and work from home setups - when a lot of the work is being planned, communicated and executed digitally. How do remote teams tackle this, especially the large companies?
I thought this insight from the HBR article is also very interesting: