How to fix our broken offices: Bring back the cubicle!

For years, the office cubicle was the four-walled avatar of corporate disaffection. Its bad rap was at least partly circumstantial — the rise of the cubicle through the 1980s and '90s coincided with sweeping company mergers, acquisitions, and downsizing that rewarded space-efficient office layouts that were easy to reconfigure. The most disposable workers were relegated to interchangeable, ever-shrinking cubes, while bosses maintained offices with obscene luxuries like windows and doors. As the white-collar workforce migrated from gleaming downtown office towers to squat suburban business parks in every shade of beige, the blandly utilitarian cubicle became a symbol of daily drudgery — the holding cell of the yuppie precariat. Late '90s films like "Office Space," "Fight Club," and "The Matrix" enshrined its detested status.

Little did anyone realize that within a few years, the cubicle walls would come crashing down. The tech boom arrived, bringing with it open office plans and a Silicon Valley-led gloss of egalitarianism, epitomized by Google's high-profile headquarters redesign in 2005. Workers became "teams," bosses became "leaders," and labor became "collaboration." The business-casual office uniform gave way to hoodies and jeans, and yuppies were rebranded as members of an exciting "creative class." By the late 2000s, many offices had ditched cubicles altogether in favor of a sea of unobstructed desks.

But now, we've come full circle, or full square: Nostalgia for the cube has quietly gathered steam. As people are called back to the office, many are yearning for the privacy and focus of the once-maligned cubicle walls. The top comment on the "Office Space" cubicle clip on YouTube captures the irony of this shift: "I would have killed for a cubicle," the commenter wrote.

'No easy silver bullet'

Designing an office isn't as straightforward as it might seem. In the early days after World War II, companies used a "bullpen" layout in which tightly packed desks mimicked the blue-collar factory floor, ideally maximizing worker efficiency. Then, in the 1960s, a semi-enclosed, modular "Action Office" was first proposed as a more private alternative that could be customized however the worker wanted. But companies, it turned out, weren't as concerned with whether workers liked their setup, but with whether they could fit everyone they needed into ever-tightening spaces. Thus, the Action Office gave way to its cheaper, boxier cousin: the cubicle, which, as the author Nikil Saval writes in his 2014 book "Cubed: The Secret History of the Workplace," grew even smaller and more drab as corporate belts tightened.

While the open-office layouts favored by Silicon Valley in the 2000s initially promised freedom from the prison of the cube farm, they were largely the result of how work was changing. With the spread of the internet and cloud storage, people needed even less room for binders and filing cabinets full of documents, which freed up space for furniture that reflected companies' newfound emphasis on collaboration and creativity. Desks and office partitions were replaced by communal worktables, couches, and even amenities such as ping-pong and foosball tables — all calibrated to keep workers together in the office for as many uninterrupted hours as possible.

Research on the ideal office layout, however, is less than conclusive. While some studies have shown that open-concept offices improve communication and camaraderie between workers, others have found the opposite. A recent, widely cited study by Harvard Business School researchers found that when companies made the switch to open offices, employees were more inclined to avoid each other in person. Face-to-face conversation plunged by 70% as colleagues took their correspondence to email and Slack.

When it comes to focus and concentration, studies have found that open-office layouts are a mixed bag. In a study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, researchers observed that workers in an open-concept office performed 14% worse on cognitive tasks than those working from cellular workstations with walls.

The lack of privacy and focus in open-concept offices hasn't been lost on workers, either. By the end of the 2010s, surveys showed that a significant share of workers felt the open-concept office put a damper on their output and creativity. These attitudes aren't just a product of the digital workplace: A 2023 Scientific American article cites a 1970 survey of workers in an open-office setting, in which people complained that the layout was noisy, distracting, and soulless.

Joseph Country, the founder of the HR consultancy firm Employee Benefits NJ, has seen a handful of clients try out, and then abandon, an open-concept layout. In most cases, he said management gave up on the plan because employees weren't happy or the company had a hard time recruiting and retaining people. But with one particular client, the switch to an open office seemed directly responsible for a spike in interpersonal conflict, gossip, and even bullying among staff.

"I spent a lot of my time investigating complaints and doing trainings on harassment, discrimination, and sensitivity," Country recalled. The company ended up creating "work zones" that limited how many people could work within earshot of each other — but turnover remained high.

Heather Chapman, who advises companies on how to design offices that promote worker well-being, suggested an explanation. "When a strained relationship arises, even if very temporary, cubicles can provide a safe-haven environment for an individual to continue working without forcing interactions they may not be ready for," she said.

On the flip side, Chapman, who is the head of ergonomics at the Michigan-based company Soter Analytics, said that "there's been a lot of study around how open office plans may enhance opportunities for spontaneous brainstorming, creativity, and bonding."

"This is all to say, there's no easy silver bullet," she said.

The cubicle's comeback

When Sydney Baker, 27, returned to her office in 2022, she was relieved. After two years of working from home as a digital marketer in Louisville, Kentucky, RTO meant a return to the cubicle.

"I prefer the cubicle, personally," she told me. "It has that versatility, versus being in an open concept, where there's not really any type of privacy or an ability to close yourself off and focus on something at hand. I need to have that, where I can just put my headphones in and ignore everyone else." On TikTok, Baker is part of a new generation of workers embracing #cubiclelife, documenting their setups and swapping tips on decor.

Thomas Roulet, a professor of organizational sociology and leadership at the University of Cambridge who researches the future of work, told me the cubicle's return to favor reflects a paradox in the modern workplace: the tension between building camaraderie and getting things done.

Different needs often correspond with levels of seniority. Junior staffers come into the office to build relationships, find mentorship, and "connect with the culture of the organization," Roulet said. More senior personnel, on the other hand, are more inclined to need "some sense of isolation to carry out thought-intensive tasks." Cubicles offer a middle-ground solution that makes the office more comfortable for workers at both ends of the spectrum. Workers can settle into their cubicles when they need to hunker down and get things done; when they want to chat or brainstorm with colleagues, they can book a meeting room or hang out in the office canteen.

Roulet pointed out that the rise of hybrid work is another likely factor behind the cube's sneaky return to favor. Many people got used to doing their focus work from home, without being distracted by coworkers. That can make the transition into open-concept office settings especially jarring. "If they're in an open space, they have to suffer noises — people chatting, people moving around — which can be very disturbing if you haven't been used to it," Roulet said.

In this view, the return of the cubical makes even more sense. For 20- and 30-somethings who entered the workforce at the height of open offices, without the "Office Space"-tinged baggage of their boomer and Gen X forebears, the cubicle was never an arbiter of corporate humiliation. And after a few years of working from the privacy of home, it's just a design setup that works.

The value of labor

Despite the cubicle's return to good graces, some remain skeptical. One longtime critic of the cube is Kevin Kelley, the cofounder of the design firm Shook Kelley and the author of the forthcoming book "Irreplaceable: How to Create Extraordinary Places that Bring People Together." Kelley opened his business in the banking hub of Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1992, when cubicles were king and male office workers seldom deviated from the uniform of a long-sleeved, white button-down shirt and necktie. Going to work meant hewing to the company hierarchy and never forgetting your place in the food chain. Workers openly plotted to ascend the corporate ladder and trade in their cubicle for a corner office.

While Kelley does not necessarily ascribe late-20th-century corporate attitudes to the office layouts of the era, he believes that the cubicle both reflected and reinforced the me-first ethos of the time. "Once you give somebody a space — a corner office or even a cubicle — people become very possessive, very territorial, and they develop habits to be private," he told me. "When companies would come to us and say, 'We want to be more innovative; we want to be more collaborative,' we would generally say that it's just very hard to do that in a cubicle-type situation."

Nevertheless, the battle between cubes and open-concept offices persists, with no decisive winner. Different organizations have different needs, and different people have different work styles.

Ultimately, workers' attitudes about office design likely have as much to do with the broader economic landscape as they do with workspace functionality. For the people made to feel disposable by the rapid crumble of employee protections, the rise of overseas outsourcing, and the mass automation of the late 20th century, the impersonal cubicle offered itself as an easy target. Now, at the tail end of the "free money" firehose of the venture-funded startup era, today's workers are less inclined to buy into the romance of the workplace as an open-air innovation lab. People just want a space where they can get their jobs done in peace, and hopefully dodge the company's next round of layoffs.

The ideal office may just be the one where workers feel like they matter.

Kelli María Korducki is a journalist whose work focuses on work, tech, and culture. She's based in New York City.