An alternate story in favour of open-office layouts. Here in Aus, the Department of Human Services (DoHS, has had many previous names) is responsible for welfare. The old offices were an arrangement with a counter - staff on one side, clients on the other. Aggressive incidents rose and the counters ended up having old-school bank bulletproof windows installed.
Some bright spark changed that - got rid of the counters, and made the offices all open-office plan. You wait off to the side, and when it's your turn for whatever, someone comes and fetches you to their desk in the open-office plan with some space between desks. Instead of shouting your personal issues across a counter, you could discuss it in a normal tone, and if it was private, you could be quieter or more subtle about the topic. Aggressive incidents dropped off a cliff - and there was much less of an 'us-versus-the-gummint' mentality seeded by the demarcation line of a [fortified] counter.
So in this particular use-case, an open-office layout was clearly superior for employees, bosses, productivity, and clients.
Some bright spark changed that - got rid of the counters, and made the offices all open-office plan. You wait off to the side, and when it's your turn for whatever, someone comes and fetches you to their desk in the open-office plan with some space between desks. Instead of shouting your personal issues across a counter, you could discuss it in a normal tone, and if it was private, you could be quieter or more subtle about the topic. Aggressive incidents dropped off a cliff - and there was much less of an 'us-versus-the-gummint' mentality seeded by the demarcation line of a [fortified] counter.
So in this particular use-case, an open-office layout was clearly superior for employees, bosses, productivity, and clients.