Open offices were supposed to tear down barriers and spark collaboration. In practice, research tells a different story. A Harvard Business School study by Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban found that when two Fortune 500 companies switched to open layouts, face-to-face interaction dropped by roughly 70%, while email and instant messaging increased by 20–50%. Employees didn't collaborate more – they withdrew.
The problem isn't disappearing. Noise, lack of privacy, and constant visual exposure remain the top complaints in open-plan offices. But the answer isn't a return to rows of grey cubicles either. The workplace in 2026 offers more options than 'open' or 'closed'.
Here are six alternatives that balance collaboration with focus, privacy with connection.
Table of Contents
Activity-based working does away with assigned desks entirely. Instead, the office is divided into zones designed for specific tasks: quiet areas for focused work, open areas for collaboration, meeting rooms for structured discussions, lounge spaces for informal conversations, and booths or pods for private calls.
The idea is that employees choose where to work based on what they're doing at any given moment, rather than sitting at the same desk all day regardless of the task.
What makes it work:
Challenges:
ABW works best in medium-to-large organisations where the office is big enough to support genuinely different zones. For smaller teams, a simplified version – a few quiet booths plus a shared collaboration area – can achieve most of the benefits at lower cost.
Not every alternative to the open office is a physical redesign. For many companies, the most effective change has been giving employees the option to work from somewhere quieter – home, a co-working space, or a private office – and connecting through video conferencing.
Remote teams that use video conferencing for structured meetings and asynchronous tools for everything else often find they get the focused work time that open offices take away, without losing the face-to-face connection that matters for team cohesion.
Benefits:
What to look for in a video platform:
Digital Samba provides all of these features in a free, browser-based video conferencing platform with no downloads required. For teams using their own software, Digital Samba Embedded adds video conferencing directly into your existing tools via API.
The hybrid model blends in-office and remote work, typically with employees coming into the office two to three days per week and working remotely the rest. It's the most common workplace model in 2026 – a Gallup survey found that over half of remote-capable employees in the US work in a hybrid arrangement, and the majority say it's their preferred model.
Benefits:
Making hybrid work:
The biggest risk with hybrid is poor execution: if meetings default to in-person with remote participants dialling in as an afterthought, the remote workers get a worse experience. Good hybrid setups treat video conferencing as a first-class part of every meeting.
The simplest alternative to an open office is bringing back walls – but in a more thoughtful way than the cubicle farms of the 1990s. Modern private offices and enclosed workstations come in several forms:
Why this works: Private spaces address the core complaint about open offices – constant interruption. Employees who need to concentrate can do so without headphones, without social withdrawal, and without the guilt of appearing 'unapproachable'.
The trade-off: Private offices cost more per square metre than open plans. That's why many companies combine a smaller number of private offices or pods with shared open areas – giving employees the option to move between private and collaborative spaces as needed.
The neighbourhood model (sometimes called 'team neighbourhoods' or 'zoned offices') assigns groups of desks to specific teams rather than giving the entire floor an open layout. Each neighbourhood might have its own small meeting area, whiteboard wall, and a few enclosed booths.
The key difference from a fully open office: you're surrounded by your own team, not a random cross-section of the company. This reduces the 'fishbowl' effect and means the ambient noise around you is more likely to be relevant to your work.
Benefits:
This model suits: Companies that want to keep some of the openness and energy of an open plan while giving teams more control over their immediate environment.
For startups, distributed teams, and companies that don't want to commit to a long-term lease, co-working spaces offer a practical alternative. Providers like WeWork, Regus, and local co-working operators offer private offices, hot desks, meeting rooms, and shared facilities on flexible terms.
Benefits:
Limitations:
For teams using co-working spaces, reliable video conferencing becomes even more important – it's the primary way distributed team members connect.
There's no single answer. The right approach depends on your team size, the nature of the work, your budget, and what your employees actually want. Some practical guidance:
The common thread across all these alternatives is that they give employees more control over their environment. The open office failed not because collaboration is bad, but because mandatory, constant exposure to dozens of colleagues all day is exhausting. The alternatives that work best are the ones that let people choose when to collaborate and when to focus.