Band 6+: Companies have different ways to arrange working space for their employees. Nowadays, a lot of offices employ open-space designs instead of separate rooms for work. Do the advantages of this outweigh the disadvantages?

Working space is an essential part of an office and the design is important to support employees during their work. Even though in the modern era, companies prefer open-space working space over the separate room due to its efficiency, I think that open-space rooms also have several drawbacks.

To begin with, it is not effective for certain divisions in the company that require high focus and special tools to support their work. For example, software engineers need private space to do their work as their job requires a lot of focus and certain equipment to maintain the company website, or the people in human resources have to organize credential documents in one place. Some people would argue that companies are supposed to provide different rooms for each department to make the work more efficient and costumed based on their needs. In addition, separate rooms would also provide comfortable space to complete the workloads and help the staff to perform better at their job because they can collaborate and have discussions with their teams easily without the intervention of other subdivisions. This can also reduce the potential of conflict between sub-departments.

Regardless of the disadvantages of open-space design, it is obviously true that open-space rooms provide several huge benefits for the institutions and the employees. One of the advantages is that one room for all subdivisions allows people to connect with each other. Many company workers usually like to build networking with peers in their work place which means that if they work in the same space, it would be easier for company staff to have a discussion and share ideas with different groups. With that being said, one room for all design will also benefit the company because the company unit can collaborate with each other. Additionally, it can reduce the company spending on building maintenance. The company can allocate their budget for other essential purposes to support the business such as for investments.

In conclusion, open-space room design has both advantages and disadvantages. It depends on the company scale and culture. If the business has enough funding to provide spacious rooms for the staff and wants their staff to work efficiently in groups then open space design is not the appropriate one and it goes the other way around.