Executives has larger, permanent desks (or offices) that don’t get bothered, and never get kicked out of a meeting room — but their assistants will kick you out of yours. The problem is invisible to them.
In my opinion if you go open office everyone should go open office even the bosses. A previous company did this. Often you would sit next to the CEO in the open office
That's not practical at any company of a decent size. High level executives routinely discuss highly confidential information which cannot be shared with lower level employees until the right time (if at all). That's the reason why they have closed door offices. They need them.
When HP made a big push towards open plan offices, one of the CEOs at the time, Meg Whitman, also moved into a “cube”.
It’s fair to says hers was bigger than average, and access to her meant walking directly through the desk areas of two assistants, however it was undeniably a cube without full-height walls and in the style of everyone else’s at that worksite.
Meg also had a conference room nearby reserved for her use, and did a fairly typical amount of travel (a lot!), but it wasn’t a purely symbolic gesture, the few meetings I had with her where we arrived early she often arose from her desk in the cube and walked over to the conference room. It seemed the desk got used.
At that time HP was doing around $120B a year in revenue and had 330,000 employees but she didn’t say, “I need a closed door office”.
I think a gesture is actually worse. They can say, hey look, I'm just like you. If I can work like this so can you. So buck up. When in fact they can go into their reserved conference room any time they want. Or not even use their bigger cube with 2 assistants. Just get the corner office and keep your gestures.
I'd agree that attempts at such gestures are a calculated risk, and when they backfire the result is worse than doing nothing. But I expect it's at least possible to sell it hard enough that you win over most of the people most of the time.
My last employer (a large British FTSE100 insurance company) did exactly this and they solved it by having a couple of boardroom style meeting rooms only they could book for discussing confidential stuff - it can work, it just requires a bit of preparation.
Mark Zuckerberg sorta did so- he had a Regular desk in a semi-regular building (that floor had some more security presence, but your standard badge would get you in, and you could walk by his desk row, though I definitely got the impression if you tried to linger or bug him security would step in rather quick). He had a private meeting room right behind him, but there were plenty of times that I walked by and saw him at his desk.
All that said, I don't think that's the norm even at Facebook, just a carefully maintained illusion.
