The open office plan that everybody loves to hate is here to stay. The ideal seating plan still involves sitting almost on top of your co-workers, according to new research from Harvard Business School. What changes, however, is who exactly sits next to whom. 

For two years, researchers followed the seating arrangements and output of 2,000 workers at an unidentified technology company, measuring the proximity and productivity of the participants by looking at how quickly they completed tasks. The denser an area is with productive people, the better it was for a nearby worker's productivity, effectiveness, and quality of work, the research found.

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