[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.