I particularly enjoyed a recent company meeting that spent considerable time talking about the importance of flow state. It had an awkward pregnant pause when someone (usually very quiet) unmuted to ask, “is the policy to increase the number of days we must spend in our open-plan office kind of undermining this?”. Literally all of our directors just shifted on their seats hoping another would answer that.

Eventually, HR director stated “Not at all, that’s what headphones are for!”

Which was particularly delightful, as our tech director had only 20 minutes before stated how he would like to discourage people sitting in the office in silos with their headphones on.