The money quote comes from Harvard Business School professor Ethan Bernstein, whose research found that “contemporary open offices led to 70 percent fewer face-to-face interactions.” Why? “People didn’t find it helpful to have so many spontaneous conversations, so they wore headphones and avoided one another.”
[T]he remote work debate is ultimately less about where we work and more about how we work. Similarly, the discussion over how much we should be in the office is less a discussion about the number of hours per week that butts are in Herman Miller Aeron chairs. It is fundamentally a debate about worker power and autonomy — and about who gets a say in designing the new rules that will govern our working lives…or whether we decide to design new rules at all.
In a monoculture, a very particular type of person thrives but also replicates itself through hiring like-minded and generally similar people. Not every workplace adheres to or has a rigid monoculture but many of the norms of the working world were designed by and still benefit a specific worker profile: white, male, educated, middle-class, congenial, sociable, and able to delegate obligations outside of the office to others…Left to its own devices, monoculture will replicate itself endlessly.
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