The demise of that comforting closed door at work and the collapse of all those partition walls means that we now have to practise in earnest what our betters have been preaching, about people being the finest asset and communication at work being paramount.

Open-plan working, they say, connects us to our own diversity and can play a role in changing how people perform.

Long corridors, distant offices and separate floors make faceto-face contact difficult and so we have relied more on email and phone or even bypassed much-needed contact completely, to the detriment of efficient performance.

Behaviour, social psychologists and anthropologists tell us, is subservient to space, structure and to the physical design of the world we work in.

Giant US electronics retailer Radioshack believed the traditional layout at its Texas HQ was incompatible with its emerging corporate objectives . . . open systems, open communication, team working . . . so the company left its 'closed' 19storey twin tower blocks of 16,500 square feet for a nearby low-rise building with double the space.

The move wasn't about location but about layout, and it meant the demise of hundreds of offices . . . and no doubt much sanity . . . on long circuitous corridors in favour of an entirely open-plan space.

Ernst & Young in the US has also restructured its space so that a central concierge facility allows staff to book rooms and stations but nobody really owns a working 'place' in the open-plan . . . or no-plan . . . system.

Here, private and public sector organisations are knocking out walls with gay abandon and introducing a trendier look to the most boring of industries, and even government departments, in the vain hope that a few brightly-coloured walls and glass partitions will resurrect longdead imaginations and result in better work output and workplace relations. Yeah right.

Walls may have ears but they would have to have been pretty hard-working ears to have picked up on the intimate conversations that openplan offices bring to us all.

My bet's on the notion that the limited imagination freefloating at work these days gets used up wondering just how the nearest colleague's au pair manages to lose the key most Fridays and how is that child ever going to learn to speak when her minder's English is so obviously chaotic.

The fact that a telephone conversation is now a public announcement and a one-toone chat a veritable narrative flow means that privacy is a thing of the past, just as is peace and quiet. Any control over the environment which offices bring with them . . . open the window, turn on the fan, increase the heat . . . is well gone in the human zoo that is the open-plan office.

One of the major driving forces behind the penchant for prissy little desks facing each other in uncomfortable cubes is the increased amount of time MDs and CEOs spend out of the office; open-plan office design usually involves the strange need for those discarded walls and closed doors to be retained for the on-highs, countering the very foundations on which open-plan principles were built in the first place.

It's well known that the least-developed and mostneeded form of communication at work is upward flow, not horizontal flow between colleagues, so keeping seniors cocooned in offices reinforces that lack even further and simply debunks the entire approach of open planning.

It's all about perspective.

There are three main current findings from research: open-plan design is beneficial due to the design accommodating the interactions of people and facilitating the work process, which is already reliably valid; open-plan systems have a negative impact because the design does not accommodate the specific work process or facilitate communication for that organisation; and openplan has negative fallout because there is no real 'design', no synchronicity with the work flow of the organisation . . . it is merely a simplistic placing of desks randomly in an open area with no symbiotic relationship to the way things are done.

It is this latter finding that appears to be the main danger for Irish organisations that merely 'buy in' open-planning without marrying it with the work process and the people.

There is no benefit, and indeed there may be a high price to pay in satisfaction rates, work quantity and quality reduction as well as increased and often petty conflict issues, where open-plan systems are merely dropkicked onto a previously contented closed-system workforce.

Have no illusions about the brightly-coloured walls and the post open-plan working environment. It is merely another physical layout, a replacement for one that may have been unhelpful, but unless open-plan places are designed in conjunction with work process experts, new workplaces will just be a cross between an open zoo and an open prison, with absenteeism and sabotage the only escape routes.