It didn’t take long for Jon Race to diagnose the problem with his new office.

Race, the CEO of the London architecture firm MCM, moved his 50-some staffers to a small co-working space in 2020 — his previous office lease ended just as the Covid-19 pandemic wound up. The new open-plan digs were fine for a mostly remote workforce, but once people started returning to the office in earnest, staffers started to voice a now-familiar lament. “They rapidly found that making Zoom calls next to people in an open-plan office can be really distracting,” says Race.