I worked in a pretty terrible open plan environment. Headphones and music were banned but it seemed loud personal conversations were not.
I worked opposite a lady who would have various male admirers who would come over several times a day to chat her up. So these guys would either stand directly behind my chair and try and talk through me or go around to her side and whisper stuff to her and they would sit and giggle.
Of course nobody achieved any actual work there, so projects were always late. Their solution was to add more people to the project and more people = even more noise.
What possible justification was there for not allowing headphones? Did the people in charge think banning headphones would make people collaborate better?
My wild, bystander-who-knows-nothing peanut-gallery guess: some manage-osaur had the internet use logs mined and found out that a lot of people were on Youtube (for music) and decided that people were "spending too much time" "on" Youtube.
I worked opposite a lady who would have various male admirers who would come over several times a day to chat her up. So these guys would either stand directly behind my chair and try and talk through me or go around to her side and whisper stuff to her and they would sit and giggle.
Of course nobody achieved any actual work there, so projects were always late. Their solution was to add more people to the project and more people = even more noise.