Collaborative Workspaces: Not All They're Cracked Up to Be

The Monday after New Year's while many folks had the day off, I spent the morning talking about the future of the workplace on KQED. Not surprisingly, callers that day had a lot to say, good and bad, about cubicles.

What was more interesting was that overwhelmingly, those who called and e-mailed to comment preferred some degree of separation from their co-workers to an open plan. Just a few days later, I attended a panel called "The Not So Corporate Campus" held at the offices of SPUR (San Francisco Planning and Urban Research, which, full disclosure and as you'll note in my bio, pays me to edit their magazine). The panel aimed to explore the direction that corporate workplaces, both urban (i.e., Twitter, salesforce.com, Zynga) and suburban (Apple, Google, Facebook) were headed. The panelists (a.k.a. corporate office decision-makers) present overwhelmingly supported open office plans, largely in service of that near mystical thing they all hope to foster: collaboration.