The return of the cubicle? How open-plan offices lost the plot
The concept of the office cubicle is re-emerging in workplace discourse as workers and companies reject noisy, open-plan layouts in favour of privacy, focus and personal comfort
How many times have you walked into the office, hoping to sit near a favourite colleague, only to find the seat next to them already taken? Or found that the one desk that suits how you work, the one with the second monitor at the right height, away from the printer noise, near the window, has been claimed before you even arrived. For many hybrid workers, this has quietly become part of the daily routine, a small negotiation before the working day has even begun.
This was not exactly what open plan offices were supposed to deliver. Open-plan offices and unassigned seating were meant to give employees choice, variety, and space to collaborate. Instead, for a growing number of people, they have become a source of low-level friction, a daily scramble for privacy, focus and a sense of place that used to come as standard with something much less fashionable, the cubicle.
A fair trial for the cubicle
Open plan offices arrived with genuine promise. They were meant to break down hierarchy, encourage spontaneous collaboration and signal a more transparent, trusting kind of workplace. Against that vision, the cubicle did not stand a chance, it symbolised bureaucracy, isolation and a workplace that did not trust its employees to manage their own space.
The problem was never the idea behind that shift. The problem is what got lost along the way. Somewhere between removing the walls and removing the desk assignments altogether, organisations also removed the privacy, personalisation and quiet that cubicles, unfashionable as they were, had quietly been providing all along.
Privacy didn’t disappear, it just got harder to find
The evidence suggests employees have not stopped needing privacy, they have simply had to find new ways to get it. Gensler’s 2026 Global Workplace Survey, covering nearly 16,400 employees across sixteen countries, found that two thirds of workers are now hacking their own workspace to compensate for what the office does not provide. Sixty five percent are using meeting rooms for solo focus work, and 64% are taking calls in hallways simply because there is nowhere private to go.
This is a widespread complaint rather than a fringe one. Steelcase and IPSOS research puts the figure at 69% of middle managers reporting a lack of privacy, while Leesman’s own data finds fewer than one in three employees believe their open office helps them do their best work. Open plan did not remove the need for privacy, it just stopped easy access to it.
Not everyone experiences an open floor the same way
Privacy is not just a preference for some employees, it is a functional need. Nearly a third of US adults now identify as neurodivergent, according to Understood.org’s 2026 survey, a figure that makes this a mainstream workplace consideration rather than a niche accommodation.
A Haworth study published in January 2026, based on interviews and survey responses from more than a thousand people across seven countries, found that neurodivergent employees were far more likely than neurotypical colleagues to be affected by noise, lighting and temperature, and more likely to leave the office altogether when the environment became too much. Thirty four percent said they had coped by leaving, compared with 20% of neurotypical workers. When they stayed, the space they sought out most was not a collaboration zone or a breakout area, it was a focus room or booth with acoustic properties, somewhere enclosed enough to shut the noise out.
The desk you keep coming back to
Even in offices designed for total flexibility, people tend to behave in remarkably unflexible ways. Give employees free choice of desk each morning, and a striking number will quietly choose the same one, day after day, whether or not the system was ever built to support that.
Gensler’s Global Co-Chair Diane Hoskins has argued that this is not a failure of employee adaptability, but a sign that unassigned seating asks people to give up something they need. Writing in Fortune in April 2026, she pointed to Gensler’s own research showing that 80% of employees in assigned seating say the office supports focused work, compared with 67% in unassigned settings. The gap in belonging is just as wide, 87% of employees with a permanent desk report feeling a sense of belonging at work, against 74% of those without one. As Hoskins put it, people who return to the same desk each day, near the same colleagues, build something that is difficult to engineer through policy alone: a sense of community.
That desire has not gone unnoticed by employers either. At a Bisnow real estate conference in June 2026, several corporate real estate leaders described a quiet reversal already under way, moving back toward more assigned seating after years of open, flexible layouts, driven less by cost logic and more by employees asking for a space to call their own.
Is the cubicle making a comeback?
Not exactly, and probably not in its original form. But the underlying needs the cubicle used to meet, privacy, focus, personal territory and a sense of belonging, have not gone anywhere. If anything, the evidence suggests those needs are becoming harder to ignore.
What is emerging instead looks less like nostalgia and more like a correction. Acoustic pods, enclosed focus rooms, assigned desks for regular in office days, quiet zones built around real behavioural data rather than assumption. Giving people somewhere they can call their own, and somewhere they can shut the noise out when they need to.
The cubicle may never make a literal comeback. But looking closely at where the modern office is heading, and it is hard not to notice how much of that direction it once quietly got right.
