About office design (C1 CAE writing exercise)

“Write paragraphs to answer the question: about office design
In some offices, employees work in enclosed workstations or cubicles. Other offices have a more open design, in which there are no walls separating employees from their coworkers.
Which type of arrangement do you think is most effective?
Explain, giving reasons to support your answer”.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(Answer)
Nowadays, the biggest and most successful companies invest a lot of money in research about psychology applied to work, in order to improve worker efficiency. For all this funding and time spent, the conclusions are often quite obvious; in general terms: the better the conditions are for workers, the better it would be their efficiency.

In this way, work spaces, such as offices, should change their old-fashioned and tight design (think about workstations) into a more natural and flexible system, where employees can interact between them. Traditionally, employers thought that employees must be enclosed in cubicles in order to ease their control and improve their attention. However, this issue has been widely proven not to be true, because this arrangement has negative effect in our mind at work, carrying to mental problems as stress, anxiety and depression (besides a lower productivity).

Beyond health care, newly open architecture in office favour communication between partners, an important task, especially in this sort of spaces, making easier to workers to help each other. Cooperation is essential in an office, even more nowadays where task are usually more complex and requires working in group.

Cambridge Advanced Exam exercise in the writing part.