Mike over at cubicles.com has an excellent blog post up right now about office design and collaboration. Collaboration has become a real buzz word over the last decade, but it’s not always easy to achieve a truly collaborative atmosphere in the workplace. Simply lowering cubicle panels and forcing everyone to live and work “in each other’s faces” all day isn’t the answer. Instead, work spaces should include environments that allow employees to talk freely and areas where they can have more privacy. Here are a couple of the takeaway quotes that can help you decide on the right balance:

“Sometimes an open floor space plan can actually inhibit collaboration, as employees may feel vulnerable about being overheard and overexposed.”

“Build flexibility into your design so that you can test permutations, and measure the designʼs effects.”

We agree. Flexibility is one of the best features of our panel extenders. They let you experiment freely at a very low cost. It only takes a few minutes to install, uninstall or move a panel extension to a new location. You can increase cubicle height easily in various configurations to find out what really works for increasing meaningful communication and collaboration.