The open office concept was the mother of all f*ck-ups

Ashley Paraday would barely make it through the workday. The fluorescent lights, the open-plan noise, the social performance expected in a shared space for 8 hours. Some times at work she'd lock herself in the bathroom for an hour just to decompress. Then go straight to bed after work. She wasn’t tired, she was Depleted. The kind of exhaustion that doesn't fix itself with a good night of sleep.

She'd been doing this for years before anyone gave her the word for it. The answer turned out to be autism.

"I'm trying to function in a society that wasn't built for me," she told the Washington Post in April 2025. She’s now a 26-year-old contractor working fully remote from Texas, anxious about what a full-time office job would cost her.

This story isn’t an edge case or dramatic scene created for effect. She is the leading edge of a wave. About 20% of your team are neurodivergent in some way at the moment. With 50%+ of Gen-Z self identifying as neurodivergent.

The companies now mandating five-days-a-week office returns: Amazon, JPMorgan, AT&T, Goldman Sachs are calling people back into the kind of environment that made Ashley lock herself in a bathroom to survive the day.

The environment initially thought to foster more productivity actually does the opposite. Extended research done by Harvard Business School found that after moving employees from a private space to an open office, face to face interactions dropped 70%. Even more telling was that employees created guards and a 'fourth wall’ to try and protect themselves from distractions.

Turns out no one wants the spontaneous bump in at the office or the pop-ins at your desk.

What needs to be learned from this is that for the average employee, the office layout has been a productivity minefield. For your neurodiverse team, it’s hell on earth 🔥

Let me make this concrete, because this isn't just a vibe.

According to the CIPD's Neuroinclusion at Work Report 2024 , the most comprehensive UK workplace survey on this topic, found that 45% of neurodivergent employees always or often feel exhausted at work, compared to 30% of their neurotypical peers. That's not a small gap. That's a systemic tax 🧾 being levied on a specific portion of your workforce, every single day, before they've done a single hour of actual work.

And it's not like employers are compensating for this. Only 37% of neurodivergent employees feel their organization provides meaningful support for their needs. The rest must try and figure out solutions or workarounds out themselves. Or hide the struggle entirely.

What's the lived version of "hiding the struggle?" Ask Matt Ketring, a 37-year-old in St. Louis. After disclosing his OCD and ADHD to his manager, the response he got was: "Let's get your OCD under control."

His reaction: "If it was a physical disability, you would never go up to someone and say, 'Let's get your one-arm thing figured out.'"

He left that job. He's now afraid that wherever he goes next will eventually force him into an office where distractions drain him and the sensory setup isn't built for how his brain works.

These aren't extreme stories. This is what happens when you design an environment for where the neurotypical employee struggles to focus and the neurodiverse one has little chance to be productive. The office environment is the problem. It’s at heart to why productivity and revenue numbers have not gone up after RTO.

Here's something most RTO conversations completely skip: the mechanism. Not just that all employees struggle in standard offices, but why.

I've been following the work of Lacey Artemis at Neuromix, who is doing some of the most rigorous practitioner-level thinking I've seen on sensory design in workspaces. One concept from her SOLACE framework to focus on is accumulated sensory load.

The idea is this: sensory load doesn't spike and reset. It stacks 📚.

Every ambient noise filtered. Every fluorescent flicker compensated for. Every smell wave from the microwave in the break room metabolized. None register as dramatic events but they accumulate, quietly and invisibly, until a tipping point. As she puts it: an avalanche isn't caused by the final disturbance. The pressure was building long before.

Her framing with the 100-point model is quite illuminating. Imagine every employee starts their day with 100 points of cognitive resilience. Except a high-sensory-sensitivity employee might arrive with only 50 due to less sleep, a harsher commute, and an already-activated nervous system. Then the office starts making deductions 💸. The fluorescent overhead lights. The open-plan conversation they can't tune out. The constant Slack chime symphony. None of these feel like a big deal. But by 11am, that employee is running on empty.

Lacey also names the mechanism behind why "fine on paper" offices still drain people: Contrast Collapse. When competing sensory inputs pile up; visual clutter, auditory noise, temperature swings, the scents drifting in from the kitchen, the brain can no longer distinguish signal from noise. It has to work harder just to orient itself. The work of being in the office becomes the cognitive cost that was supposed to be available for actual work.

This is why HOK's design research talks about environments that are "fine" on the surface still producing disengagement. It's not dramatic. People just quietly go quiet, leave early, or do less. From the outside it looks like a motivation problem. It's an environment problem.

The question isn't whether this is real. The question is: who pays for it?

Right now? Your neurodivergent employees are. With their cognitive capacity. Before they've written a line of code or made a single decision.

The sensory inclusion industry has a default move: add a quiet room.

Noise-canceling headphones. Sensory breaks. A fidget kit in a basket by the coffee machine. These things that help share one hidden assumption: the environment stays broken, and the individual has to manage around it.

HOK's Tom Polucci and Kay Sargent, who are among the most cited researchers in workplace design, have spent years documenting the gap between what offices are built to do and what brains actually need. Their research starts with a simple observation: the average office wasn't designed for the average brain. It was designed for one particular kind of brain, and then that design was assumed to be neutral.

It isn't.

"Those distraction: sound, smell, visual clutter lead to a loss of focus," Polucci said. "One of my favorite examples is when someone decides to heat up last night's fish in the microwave at work, and that smell permeates the space. It annoys everyone, except the person eating the fish for lunch. And what does that lead to? Discomfort. Disengagement. And ultimately, a drop in productivity."

That's not a neurodivergent problem. That's an everyone problem which is exactly the point.

"The things that make a space better for the neurodivergent often improve it for everyone," said Sargent. When you fix the environment instead of handing people coping tools, the whole workforce benefits. HOK calls this the rising tide: design that lifts all boats.

Their research identifies 5 concrete levers for getting there: Choice (zones of varying stimulation so people can match space to task). Sensory load management (dimmable and indirect lighting, acoustic zoning, sound-masking technology, calming materials and palettes). Predictable and navigable space (clear wayfinding, color-coded zones, no "figure it out as you go" layouts). Personalization and control (adjustable furniture, task lighting, sensory kits, etc). The ability to tune your immediate environment. Biophilia (natural light, greenery, organic materials, all proven to reduce stress and support focus).

None of these are luxury interventions 💡. They're design decisions that should be made before anyone sits down at a desk for the first time.

"We need to get to a place where work works for everyone," Sargent said. "And that starts with how we design the space around us."

Most RTO mandates are still stuck on the thought being back together in the office will create better business outcomes. They mandate the return without auditing what people are returning to 🔥. That’s what really effects better business outcomes.

Here's the thing that drives me a little 🤯 when I watch the RTO debate play out. Companies are spending enormous energy and political capital to drag people back into offices not understanding the real impact of RTO and success. I laugh every time someone says “The office is better for productivity or where company culture happens.”

The pandemic gave neurodivergent employees something that workplace design teams have been trying to manufacture for years.

Environment control.

Working from home, a neurodivergent employee can dim the lights. Kill the background noise. Control the temperature. They can take a real break instead of a performance of looking busy. Work in 2-hour hyper-focus sprints rather than 8 hours of low-grade sensory maintenance. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told direct reports to take a long 2 hour lunch to nap when they shared in the daily async stand up that they were tired. Which is better? Losing an extra hour to a lunch power nap and gaining the afternoon of better productivity or 8 hours of exhausted sub-optimal work?

This is not a lifestyle preference. This is access 🔑.

Remote work, for many neurodivergent employees, provides those conditions by default. Not perfectly and not for everyone. I’ll be honest here. Some neurodivergent employees actually struggle more at home. Not because remote doesn’t work but even most remote companies don’t do remote right. Like endless zooms, immediate Slack replies, cameras always on, and more. But when done right, remote eliminates the overhead that was quietly eating their capacity.

Which brings me to the uncomfortable question hiding in the middle of every RTO announcement: if you're mandating the return to office, have you actually built an office worth coming back to?

Cisco thought seriously enough about this question that they rebuilt an entire office around it.

Cisco's Finsbury Circus office in Central London completely renovated and opened in late 2025 is one of the best documented examples of genuine neuroinclusive office design by a major corporation. Not a wellness room. Not a couple of phone booths at the side of an open office layout. Actual systematic rethinking of how a workspace functions for people who process their environment differently.

📹 Cisco has published a full video tour of the space — watch it here. It's the closest thing to a real walkthrough of a neuroinclusive office I've found from a major company.

Here's what they built 🏗️:

Spatial planning and sensory zoning. The entire floor is intentionally divided into high-stimulation and low-stimulation zones. You're not randomly navigating a sea of identical open-plan desks hoping to find a quiet corner. The zones are visible, labeled, and navigable. Open sight lines help people orient themselves without the anxiety of a maze layout. HOK's research names this as the single highest-leverage design move: when people can choose their environment based on what they need in the moment, engagement and performance improve across the board.

A single-person reflection room. A private retreat for quick recovery from sensory overload or stress. Not a phone booth: a recovery space, designed specifically for the purpose of resetting without having to explain yourself to a coworker. Cisco included this knowing that even well-designed environments have hard days. The recovery space is a feature, not a workaround.

Lighting designed for choice. Overhead circuits stay consistent throughout the space, but quiet and focus areas have dimmable lamps and low-hanging fixtures. Lower stimulation where lower stimulation is needed. Dimmable, task-level lighting is one of the single highest-impact changes a space can make for sensory-sensitive workers.

Acoustic design, not acoustic wallpaper. Soundproof meeting rooms, acoustic treatments in focus areas, and this detail matters. Printers strategically placed away from focus zones. The enemy isn't just loud meetings. It's the ambient noise machine of a functioning office that no one ever mapped to a floor plan.

Air quality and thermal comfort by sensor. Temperature and ventilation managed by building sensors with enhanced airflow in quiet zones to remove the olfactory chaos of a shared food and perfume environment. (If you've ever had to flee a room because someone microwaved fish, you understand this viscerally 🐟.)

Colors and materials with intention. Calming neutral palettes with natural finishes — cork and wood accented with enough color to help people identify zones without triggering visual overload. Gensler's research on neuroinclusive design echoes this: avoid high-contrast or overly patterned surfaces, choose warm textures, and let materials do sensory work that the brain would otherwise have to do itself.

Digital way-finding. Cisco Spaces, their workplace app, provides real-time navigation to available desks and meeting rooms. No anxious scanning. No standing at a crossroads not knowing where to sit. Reduced cognitive cost of existing in the building.

These guidelines are now standardized in Cisco's global Workplace Design Playbook. This isn't a one-off experimental space. It's a documented system being exported to offices worldwide.

What did this cost? Cisco hasn't published a per-square-foot figure. What we know from the broader industry is that neuroinclusive retrofits: acoustic panels, sensory zoning, upgraded lighting control, dedicated quiet spaces are modular and scalable. You're not necessarily blowing the building up and starting over. You're making deliberate choices about what you're building and why.

Compare that to what you're giving up if you don't: the average cost savings of remote work is approximately $11,000 per employee per year in real estate, utilities, overhead, and facilities costs. That’s the budget you are spending to call people back into a standard office. If you’re going to spend that budget at least invest it; not waste it.

🖥️ If you're doing remote right: A home office stipend is a good start. But handing someone $1,000 and saying "set up your workspace" is not a winning strategy. Most people have no idea what lighting temperature supports focus. They don't know how desk orientation affects hyper-vigilance. They buy whatever headphones are on sale. The stipend gets spent, and the sensory setup is still wrong.

🏢 If you're bringing people back to an office:

Not every company can rebuild their office from scratch the way Cisco did with Finsbury Circus. But the research from HOK, Gensler, and Cisco consistently surfaces a short list of changes that don't require construction, just intention. Here are the quick wins that appear across the sources:

If your company has implemented any neuroinclusive features to the office, I’d love to hear about them. Or if sensory overload has impacted your productivity in the office, drop a comment or reply directly.

If you're in HR or the C-Suite and wondering why productivity & revenue hasn’t 📈 like you expected when RTO, a lot is due to your office space. Reply directly or share it with whoever needs to see it. Sometimes the conversation that changes a policy starts with an article.

And if you want help building the infrastructure that gives every employee an equal opportunity to be productive and a super star whether in the office or remote, reach out.