Designing an office plan is one of the most difficult things to do in support of a business. Every group works differently, has different technology or privacy needs, wants different levels of collaboration space, cares about the creative nature of the space, or simply wants to sit next to the people they work with the most.
The fact is, designing the ideal workplace is nearly impossible. In reality, the best you can hope for is to design a workplace focused around flexibility so that occupants have the ability to control their productivity themselves. And that is the biggest win possible – when you enable people to find their own productivity sweet spot you will improve the average productivity of the office considerably.
Designs that focus on getting everyone to the same average productivity may improve the bottom end but it will cap the top end productivity of your superstar employees. Typically a fixed workplace limits collaboration more than any other item which is the area that allows for exponential productivity increases. If you uncap the potential of your top producers you will find greater net business improvement even if it means some of the poorer performers self-limit themselves through bad decisions.
The self-limiters are also now going to have nowhere to hide because their productivity is their own to control. A flexible workplace gives no excuses to anyone to not be at least at average productivity. When there is no place to hide, the best rise to the top.