Our company has a large open area office where our drafting department is located. New policy takes affect Monday. No headphones or earbuds and phone use only during break or lunch. They mostly listen to music or stream movies while they should be doing autocad. Hope a bunch quit. We need new blood.
IMHO, and based on my own experience as an employee and a manager, if you have staff that are paid to solve complex problems, pay attention to detail, or manage technical processes, then anything you can do to help them minimize distraction and interruption will pay off in accuracy and productivity. Individual offices would be the ideal, but headphones and partitions can accomplish much the same for a fraction of the cost.
Movies are probably a bridge too far, but for certain especially creative and productive individuals, especially if they were on a major project in progress and had some downtime waiting on something or monitoring something, I’d let it slide and even condone it.
Of course, I’m in IT, which is a field that is still largely merit-based and new enough to not have ossified as some others have. And we often work long hours at weird times and places in order to minimize adverse effects on the core business. Finding people who can and will do that, and are competent, often requires some flexibility other business functions can’t or won’t offer.
My gfx dept had 4 folks and they gave us a big room with no door. We did technical illustration for training manuals for oil refineries, various software. Anyway my desk was the first inside to screen people. We had two desk lamps per desk and created “light islands”, no cubes, no overhead lights. We were separated or not depending on our mood. Low background music. Worked well.