Open-office noise and team communication: why moving desks further apart does almost nothing
The lever with the best return is the panel between people, not the gap between them. Panel height and panel material determine whether a seated person is acoustically separated from the one opposite, and both are properties of the furniture rather than the building. A guide to choosing office workstations will list panel height as a headline variable, alongside footprint and storage, precisely because it is the decision that changes the acoustic result rather than a finish option.