Visual distraction is the second worst, IMO, with noise in third.
Number 1 is vibration and physical movement. I've had a desk environment where two folks would be sitting on opposite sides of a wide table, so there's one shared and non-isolated surface that both people work on.
Every time my coworker would stand up, they'd brace themselves on the desk and shake the shit out of it, and I never learned to filter it out. Headphones don't help. Lots of big monitors don't help.
Or when the hardwood floor has enough flex that you can feel people walking near your desk. Ugh.
Where I currently am (I'm a consultant, based mostly in various client offices), the floor has a lot of flex in it. When people walk past, I can feel it bouncing under my chair.
We do have decent-sized desks, so the open plan isn't too bad. It's actually pretty good as these things go, although there are no kitchens in which one can make a proper cup of tea.
No proper kitchens for tea-making.
We're in England.
Come on!
Admittedly this is a German company I'm working with at the moment, but still, the office is full of Brits.
Open plan is perfectly normal here, but I still hate it. Especially the ones where they put really loud people near you (but you can't make a seating plan based on how loudly people tend to talk), or when there are people whose jobs involve loads of phone calls and who shout down their headsets, in the same open plan space as a highly technical team who really need to concentrate and occasionally have a quiet conversation with each other.
No one space works for everyone. It just doesn't. And that's not even taking into account personal variations, as we've seen from these comments some people like the open collaborative possibility and some feel the need to hide away and bash the keyboard for hours at a time.
I have days when I want to do one, and days for the other, so I really don't know what kind of office I'd like!
I worked with a twitchy guy in the same office. It was horrible. He would constantly be pumping his foot on the floor, vibrating the entire room. After I asked him to stop a few times, he got out of the habit, but damn, it is distracting.
Then of course some PM would swing by and talk to him about stocks or something silly. The PM didn't have anything better to do.
We were also right by the break room, so people would constantly be chatting.
I think you should just put developers and only developers on a floor. Everyone else who needs to chit chat and only has to attend meetings can go on another floor.
A big issue for me is the office climate. In an open space there's always going to be people who are too hot or too cold. A healthy 30 percent is going to be miserable at any given setting.
Number 1 is vibration and physical movement. I've had a desk environment where two folks would be sitting on opposite sides of a wide table, so there's one shared and non-isolated surface that both people work on.
Every time my coworker would stand up, they'd brace themselves on the desk and shake the shit out of it, and I never learned to filter it out. Headphones don't help. Lots of big monitors don't help.
Or when the hardwood floor has enough flex that you can feel people walking near your desk. Ugh.