[thawaway1837]

Aren’t libraries usually open spaces? But they enforce strict silence.

So you can go tap on anyone’s shoulder but if you want to have a conversation you need to head to a non working area.

That sounds like the best idea to me. Open office plan, but no loud conversations are allowed. You need to maintain strict library like silences. However, you also provide enough breakout rooms or non quiet areas where people can head over to to have a discussion.

[mrkstu]

Which of course can never work in an office environment. Leave your desk for every Zoom/WebEx conference call? Whisper with the colleague who needs to talk to you for a minute about something? You're not going to decamp to a meeting area for all the daily grind stuff- so the open area is always going to be interruptingly loud.

[alicorn]

We have unofficial office rules that work just like that. We do not have a sea of 50 people in the same space however, instead we have sort of isolated spaces that contain about 15-20 people each. All phone calls, chats longer than a minute or two ('I need to whiteboard this with you') and such are always done in small dedicated phone / meeting rooms on the sides of the open space. There is an adjacent coffee and food eating space shared by 3 such shared spaces, so about 40 people. It works well enough, almost everyone is mindful of sticking to the rules, since it benefits everybody to keep it that way.