Last month, I wrote a column suggesting that young women should think twice before taking “lazy girl jobs” — jobs that entail entirely remote work and place few demands on workers’ time or attention. Such jobs have obvious appeal in the short term. But remote workers don’t build the skills and connections that can help them one day get a better job. They’re also probably at higher risk of getting laid off when the next recession hits.

Predictably, this earned me the ire of folks who saw a libertarian columnist taking the side of capital over labor. Why aim the critique at young women who are hunting for a little work-life balance, rather than the employers who want to monopolize our time? All right, let me now offer some advice to employers who want their workers back in the office: Why not give those workers offices worth returning to?

And I mean this literally: offices. Not open floor plans where people can hear every word, sneeze and gum-chew that comes from a co-worker’s mouth. Nor dispiriting cubicles that make them feel like rats in a maze. But small rooms with desks and doors that close.

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Now, I’m not suggesting that the annoyances of open offices are the only reason workers don’t want to return to the office. After all, you can’t wear your pajamas in the office. You can’t walk the dog in the middle of the day or run to the kitchen to get dinner started. And no matter how nicely appointed, offices are a very inconvenient distance from one’s bed.

But the open office certainly doesn’t help make workers want to come back. It is, as aforementioned, noisy, which makes it difficult to do any work that requires sustained concentration. Yet somehow, an open office also makes one reluctant to chat with co-workers or make important telephone calls, knowing that every word will have an audience of dozens, some of them visibly annoyed that your chitchat is derailing their train of thought. Tightly spaced desks in open offices also often feel cramped; everyone has just enough room to type without jostling elbows.

Bosses are presumably well aware of these drawbacks, since so many of them arrange to have, you know, offices. Surely, they can understand how employees might find offices enticing, too.

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Yet already, I can hear upper management screaming. Offices for everyone? How will we manage workers we can’t see? What about all the collaboration we’ll lose when people are shut away behind closed doors? What about the cost?

If you want to watch your employees work, build glass walls. As for collaboration, yes, the benefits of in-person work look substantial: In addition to fostering team spirit, it seems to help workers acquire skills, and, over the long run, it probably boosts productivity. Even Zoom, the backbone of remote work, is now demanding its employees come into the office a couple days a week.

But it’s hardly clear that workers need to be practically on top of one another to reap these gains. In fact, excessive closeness might be a detriment: In a 2018 study, researchers used digital devices to record actual interactions between co-workers before and after their firm switched from cubicles to an open floor plan. They found that face-to-face interactions actually decreased by about 70 percent. That’s on top of the other concentration-wrecking, morale-sapping, stress-inducing, potentially disease-spreading side effects of tearing down the walls.

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As for the cost — aye, there’s the rub. While a belief in the profit-enhancing power of collaboration was one reason for adopting open offices, it was not the only one. Employers also liked that you can pack a lot more desks into an open floor plan than into a place with walls; plus, you don’t have to pay someone to build the walls.

But the remote work revolution actually makes this tradeoff less painful for the wily manager who is willing to give workers some space and privacy if the boost to productivity outweighs the cost. Because right now, the cost of extra space is falling.

As other employers use remote work to downsize their space, owners of commercial properties are facing what Curbed recently dubbed an “office apocalypse.” The site reports that 5 Times Square, formerly “a gleaming centerpiece of 42nd Street’s revival,” is “currently close to empty.” It’s not the only one, and that’s starting to cut into office rental rates. In a report last month on the effects of hybrid work, McKinsey & Company predicted that this effect “will only worsen over the next seven years.”

This will be awful for commercial landlords, their banks and their cities’ tax bases. But cheaper real estate presents an opportunity for employers with vision. Rather than try to threaten or cajole their way to the productivity-boosting benefits of in-person work, they can bring their workers together by giving them space to keep apart.

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