Long before covid...
One of my clients had an open plan hot desking office, where, if you arrived after about 08:45 for any reason, you usually couldn't find a desk for the day. They had a 'clear desk' policy as well, so if you had a desk you had to lock your day's documents away in the desk pedestal, so you were unlikely to ever find them again unless you broke the policy and hid them somewhere else. Then they decided they had some 'spare office space' and rented half the floor out to another company. So you had staff of two companies operating in an unsegregated open plan space. They put a barrier up to segregate one 'particularly sensitive' section, but unfortunately the communal meeting rooms were behind the barrier as well, so staff of both companies had to cross the barrier to use them.
I believe this is called 'planning for efficiency'.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
