BT Office Warns the Open-Plan Office Was Never Designed for a World of Constant Video Calls

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Sep 14, 2026, 08:33 ET

BT Office says the rise of video meetings has exposed a mismatch between how open-plan offices were designed and how people now work.

POOLE, England, Sept. 14, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- BT Office Furniture is warning that many open-plan offices are being asked to support a working culture they were never designed for, as video meetings and online calls increasingly take place alongside focused individual work.

The commercial office furniture and workplace design specialist says the issue is not simply that offices are getting louder. It is that employees are increasingly expected to concentrate while nearby colleagues may be speaking continuously on Teams, Zoom, or other video calls.

Open-plan office design predates this way of working by decades. Herman Miller introduced Action Office 2 in 1968 as the world's first open-plan modular office system, designed around flexibility and changing workplace needs [1].

But office communication has changed dramatically since then.

Microsoft's 2024 Work Trend Index found that users spend 60% of their time in Microsoft 365 apps on email, chat, and meetings, compared with 40% in creation applications such as Word and PowerPoint [2]. The figure covers all three forms of communication rather than video meetings alone, but it illustrates how communication-heavy the modern workday has become.

Nigel Curtis, Sales Manager of BT Office said:

"The open-plan office itself isn't necessarily the problem. The problem is that we're asking it to support types of work that weren't part of the equation when many of these layouts were conceived.

"You can have one person concentrating on detailed work while somebody a few metres away is speaking throughout a video meeting. Multiply that across an office and several very different activities are competing for the same space."

Research into workplace acoustics suggests that understandable speech is particularly difficult to ignore.

A study of 1,078 employees in shared and open-plan offices found that irrelevant speech, including conversations between colleagues, telephone calls and laughter, increased noise annoyance and reduced reported work performance. The effects were greater in open-plan offices than in smaller shared offices [3].

BT Office says the growth of video meetings makes that established problem increasingly relevant. A call does not necessarily have to be particularly loud to distract nearby colleagues if every word is still clearly heard.

Rather than abandoning open-plan offices, the company believes workplaces need to provide greater choice. Open areas can continue to support collaboration, while acoustic booths, pods, quiet areas and smaller meeting spaces can give employees somewhere more suitable for calls and focused conversations.

Nigel Curtis added:

"A ten-minute video call doesn't necessarily need a six-person meeting room, but taking it at a desk may disturb several colleagues.

"The modern office doesn't need to choose between open plan and private offices. It needs to give people somewhere appropriate to do each type of work."

BT Office believes the next stage of workplace design will be less about fitting as many desks as possible into one floorplate and more about creating a mix of environments that support concentration, collaboration and digital communication side by side.

Learn more at: btoffice.co.uk

About BT Office Furniture

BT Office Furniture & Interiors is a privately owned commercial office furniture company based in Poole, Dorset. Founded in 1994, the company supplies office furniture and provides space planning, fit-out, refurbishment and installation services for organisations across the UK.

Media Contact

BT Office Furniture
Unit 3, 2 Willis Way
Fleets Industrial Estate
Poole, Dorset
BH15 3SS

Phone: 0800 298 7033
Email: [email protected]
Website: btoffice.co.uk

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SOURCE BT Office Furniture