When I was involved in Air Traffic Control work, we made a deliberate effort to look at the research and design a work environment that would maximize productivity. The core finding was that people needed about 25% of their time in a collaborative environment, and 75% of their time focused without outside distraction. I suspect that numbers haven't changed that much from this core finding.
The resulting environment looked like the following. One and two person offices were set up on the perimeter of the building floor. Open lab space and meeting tables were set up in the middle. The idea was that people would be able to quickly meet in the middle for collaborative work (meetings, design brainstorming, lab work) but be able to retreat to their offices for focused individual work. There was at least one closed conference room intended for customer interaction and other general office use. We successfully (on budget, on time, profitable) delivered systems to civil aviation authorities in twenty three different countries. The product line had no losses - no other product line had the same track record with the same breadth of customers over years. We were long term profitable and had a solid customer reputation with repeat followup work and upgrades Alas, about 10 years after inception, some bean counter decided that on some Excel spreadsheet we weren't profitable "enough" (yes, despite some other product lines being perennial loss centers). The product line was closed down, warranty work was transferred to another location, and the facilities were eventually reconfigured into indistinguishable cubes with offices for managers.
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