How to Plan an Open Office: Bench Systems, Productivity and Acoustics

Planning an open office is more engineering and less "lining desks up side by side" than most companies assume. Done right, an open office speeds up communication between teams, uses square meters efficiently and adapts to growth. Done wrong, it drags productivity down with noise, distraction and desks that never stop moving. As an office furniture manufacturer based in Inegol that handles design, production and installation under one roof, the difference we see on site always starts at the same point: a good open office is planned before any furniture is chosen. In this guide we walk through how to set up an open office from start to finish, step by step, from space planning and bench system selection to the balance of acoustics and privacy, cabling and growth scenarios.

Space Planning: Square Meters per Person and Circulation

Everything starts with space. In an open office, the area per person determines both comfort and practical usability. As a general starting point, a bench-type workstation with a total of 4 to 6 square meters per person (including the desk, chair movement area and a share of circulation space) provides a comfortable density. This figure drops in dense call-center type layouts and rises for executive-heavy teams or those that need quiet. It is best treated not as a rule but as a starting point to be tuned to how the team actually works.

Planning should start with flow, not desk count. Clarify these questions:

• Where do people enter the day and what route do they follow?
• How close are meeting rooms, the kitchen and print-and-storage areas to the working zone?
• Does the main circulation corridor flow without cutting through the bench rows?
• How does daylight from the windows spread across the desks through the day?

In practice, keeping main passage corridors at least 120 centimeters and secondary passages where two people cross at 80 to 90 centimeters seriously reduces congestion and the daily "make way" traffic. For workstation depth, a tabletop depth of 70 to 80 centimeters per bench is a balanced range for monitor distance and keyboard comfort. Setting up daylight and views parallel to the long axis of the bench rows also reduces screen glare and gives more even brightness throughout the day.

Bench System Selection: Modular Workstation Setup

The bench system is the backbone of the open office. Its biggest advantage over classic single desks is that you can build several workstations on a shared supporting frame, with shared legs and a common cable channel. This both saves square meters and makes later additions and removals easier.

When choosing a bench system, we recommend prioritizing these criteria:

• Modularity: Can the stations grow in blocks of 2, 4 or 6, or are you locked into a fixed length?
• Shared supporting legs: When legs are shared under the tabletops, both material and leg volume drop, and knee-level movement space widens.
• Tabletop quality: In a heavily used open office, the tabletop must resist impact and scratches and not swell against moisture. Quality manufacturers prefer low-emission boards with cleanly edge-banded surfaces; this is healthier both for durability and indoor air quality.
• Adjustability: Is a fixed height enough, or is a height adjustment that supports sit-stand working needed? In mixed teams, it is possible to plan both together.

In bench layout, a face-to-face arrangement increases communication but reduces visual privacy, while a back-to-back arrangement supports focus. In most offices the healthiest approach is to mix these two logics zone by zone according to each team's work. When choosing, making sure that desktop accessories, monitor arms and divider panels attach to the same system removes the extra headache of matching parts during later changes.

The Balance of Acoustics and Privacy

Noise is the most complained-about aspect of the open office. The good news is that acoustics can largely be controlled at the planning stage. The goal here is not to silence the office entirely, but to lower distraction by reducing how clearly conversations carry to neighboring stations.

The main interventions that work in practice are:

• Desktop acoustic panels: Soft-surfaced dividers placed between bench stations both cut speech sound and create a visual boundary.
• Absorbent ceiling and wall surfaces: The echo of hard glass and concrete surfaces should be balanced with acoustic ceiling panels or wall coverings.
• Zone separation: Not putting phone-heavy teams and deep-focus teams in the same block is the cheapest and most effective acoustic solution.
• Quiet pods: Small cabins reserved for one-on-one meetings, short calls or a concentration break reduce the pressure in the open area.

By privacy we mean not just sound but also screen and document visibility. Keeping panel height slightly below eye level in a seated position preserves the sense of openness while preventing constant eye contact from across the desk. Additional surfaces such as carpet or acoustic tiles on the floor, soft furniture and green plants also break up sound and complete this balance; the most realistic approach is to look for acoustics not in a single product but in the sum of overlapping small interventions.

Cabling and Infrastructure Management

Whether an open office keeps its first-day layout depends largely on the quality of cable management. An office that looks tidy but is built on weak infrastructure falls apart within a few months into power strips hanging under desks and tangled cables.

For solid infrastructure, these points must be solved at the planning stage:

• Vertical drop points: Power and data should descend cleanly through the bench leg or the leg channel, and cables should be collected in a hidden channel under the tabletop.
• Horizontal cable channel: A common channel running along the bench keeps power and data lines separated, providing both safety and order.
• Desktop access: When sockets, USB and data outlets are provided from a covered module on the tabletop, the user does not bend under the desk every time.
• Load and expansion margin: Infrastructure should be sized not for today's device count but with monitors, laptops, charging and future equipment in mind.

Thinking of cabling separately from furniture is the most common mistake. Planning the bench system and the power-and-data infrastructure together both speeds up installation and keeps the office tidy over the years. If power is fed from the floor, marking the cable trunking or raised-floor routes already on the first layout drawing prevents channels cut open later and visible add-on lines.

Growth Scenarios and Modularity

An open office should be planned not for the team size on the day it is set up, but for the team three years later. Companies grow, teams relocate, projects come and go. That is why the most valuable feature is a layout that can be rebuilt.

For a growth-ready setup we recommend:

• Standard module dimensions: When all stations sit on the same grid, future additions do not become planning from scratch.
• Add-and-remove logic: Extending a bench length or splitting a block should be possible without changing the whole system.
• Flexible zones: For a 6-person block today to become 4 people plus a meeting corner tomorrow, the intermediate panels and infrastructure should be built to move.
• A common language: Keeping the same material, color and dimension family makes later-added stations look consistent with the original set.

Modularity is not just a comfort but long-term budget protection. A reconfigurable system lets you carry the existing investment at each growth step instead of refurnishing the office from scratch. To keep the same dimension family going for years, choosing a system that belongs to a product family likely to stay available in the future reduces the matching problem at each growth step from the very start.

Turning the Plan into Reality

Success in open office planning comes less from choosing the right individual products and more from thinking of these five layers (space, bench setup, acoustics, cabling and growth) as connected. Neglecting one layer lowers the performance of the others: in an office where acoustics are unsolved, even the best desks feel uneasy, and a setup with weak infrastructure falls apart within months even with the most modular system.

In our production in Inegol we see the difference of handling all these layers under one roof on every project; having design, production and installation in the same team ensures the planned layout and the built layout match each other. We think of our workstation and bench system solutions not as a ready catalog list but as a plan built for your square meters and team structure. If you share your office dimensions, headcount and way of working, we can prepare a project-specific proposal together, from space layout to material and infrastructure selection.