Hot desk hell: Staff spend two weeks a year looking for seats in open-plan offices People spend an average of two bloody weeks a year just looking for a frigging desk to work at, thanks to hot-desking. According to a survey, staff spend an average of 18 minutes every day pootling about for a space to plonk down their laptop. Using the power of maths (220 working days) gives a total of 66 hours a year, or …
Not that either will move the short-sighted bean counters a millimetre.
Think that the world moved on even further in favour of the bean counters. That's why they want everybody to work from home. Good thing about that is though that you can do biz in a dressing gown, have a shower after noon, and... and...
Just remember the bean counters are the front line in the fight for all our jobs.
Of all the staff in most offices, the bean mob has bled and died at the sharp end of IT for coming on for 60 years. Decimated twice a decade, now you tend to only see the pathetic hardcore remnants clinging to a bleak and progressively miserable existence after being ground beneath the oblivious boot heel of IT automation.
Find an old retired accountant. Ask them about the glory days when accounts staff took up a large chunk of the budget, how many people filled those productive roles. Gone forever. Along with the tea lady.
As a BOFH, I have to say, I only ever had to hot desk once. They never tried it again!
Open plan is also bloody awful, but again I only ever did a few days of that. I have mostly either had my own office or shared an office with 2 - 3 other people.
Even that can get annoying, when everybody is trying to telephone at the same time, they are all trying to out-shout each other all the time.
Where I am currently there is the IT Manager, 2 BOFHs and a PFY. The ITM has his own glass cubicle, the rest of us share a large office. That's about as open-plan as I want to get.
I suspect it is more because in an open plan office firstly you cannot have a private conversation and secondly and perhaps most importantly you have fewer options for terminating a conversation as well.
How can you bitch to your friend about that bitch/bastard over there if they can hear you? Come into my office <closes door>.
I work from home now, thank goodness, but when I was in the open-plan office it used to be awful trying to have an in-depth technical discussion Hangouts conference while one of the recently-sprogged sales girls brought in their new screaming babies. That, and having to listen to the office dork on the other side endlessly telling stories.. "say, did I ever tell you about that time when....".
NEVER AGAIN!!
New open plan office. Boss to have a desk 'just like everyone else'
2 meeting rooms available
2 weeks before 1 meeting room was reserved for the director and miraculously lost it's conference table and gained a desk, leather chair, phone etc.
Anon, obv!
Similar case for a vendor I worked with.
After moving to a new building, managers were put on the open floor with everyone else.
A friend's manager promptly booked one of the meeting rooms every day for the next ten years, forwarded his phone, and moved his computer (desktop, not laptop) into the meeting room.
Other managers immediately followed suit.
As a result, company meetings were usually either in the cafeteria, or the outdoor patio (in the summer). Of course, neither has white boards, or phones, but it's not like productivity matters, or anything.
We're about to go through the very same exercise. It has been commanded from head office that there shall be no more offices, everyone will be "on the floor". Taking into consideration that we're also hearing that there may not actually be enough desks for everyone and "don't we have a lot of swish new meeting rooms" it's obvious what's going to happen.
Researchers gave staff wearable monitors
I can see how having monitors that you wear, instead of the ones that sit at the back of the desk, might make hot-desking easier. But I use two 27" monitors, and having to wear them could make moving around difficult. Would I get to take them off when I go home? Could be awkward on a crowded Tube.
For some reason, the image that my mind generated in response to that idea still visualised someone walking around with CRT monitors strapped to their arms (even though, hopefully, none of us have used them for years).
With that set up, you wouldn't need to go to the gym to get any exercise!
(Or alternatively you might need to be issued with a Colonial Marines cargo loader as part of your office wear.)
I used to work for a public sector organisation who had an office with hot desks in them, if I wasn't in before 8:30 I'd have to travel to our other site (40 miles away) to hot desk there. Senior management didn't have to hot desk.. then would moan about us spending our time to travel.
Thing is the hot desks were introduced so they could save a few grand a year on office space and convert some offices into meeting rooms, which we weren't allowed to book out in advance unless there was a group of us.
Hot desking is fundamentally flawed..
Hot desking is fundamentally flawed.
My experience is that it works, but only in very, very limited situations. If you have the same people coming into the same office on a regular basis, it is a complete waste of time. On the other hand, if there is a group of individuals that are in the office on an occasional or irregular basis, it makes a lot more sense. The only other situation that I have been in that applies has been in a production environment that had to operate multiple shifts. Having said that, people tended to end up in the same spots without assignments being made due to which machines were open was down to the same folks working the same hours every day.
+1
I remember when laptops were a new thing. I worked at a large IT company, and salescritters were offered a choice - to either keep their office/cubes, or get a file cabinet, a laptop, and hotdesks. I think 100% of sales staff below VP level chose the laptop+hotdesk option.
But I agree hotdesks for staff who need to regularly be in the office is simply silly. My current employer policy is to hotdesk anyone in the office less than 50% of the time. We aren't a major site and local facilities management are less stupid than the home office; they don't even suggest it unless you average less than a couple days a month in the office.
I'm reminded of the bank I worked at where people had a choice of laptop or desktop. All of the sales types chose laptops.
Of course, one was stolen the first week, so from that point onward, every laptop was chained to a desk via a metal cable assembly that the user could not remove. It you wanted to move your portable laptop, you could submit a relocation request, in writing, which would be reviewed within two weeks.
On the one hand, the laptops were far less powerful than the desktops. On the other hand, they were considerably more expensive. But, they were told, that was the tradeoff you had to accept, in order for the benefit of portability.
We software developers, with our big, bulky desktops, would taunt the sales types by bringing our desktops and monitors into meetings with them. We bragged we could run with our computers the length of the building faster than they could with their laptops, which annoyed them greatly.
I had been an employee with a desk, but came back as a consultant. No desk, only the hot variety. There were also rules about not taking papers and the company's laptop out of the building. Every night I shackled my laptop to the team assistant's desk, put the box file of my papers under said desk, and went home. In the morning, I would retrieve laptop and box and then spend a good 30 minutes roving around trying to find a desk. When there were none, as often happened, I would sit in the pleasant coffee area answering emails on my phone and generally enjoying myself. When a desk came free, I was at it and down to work...sometimes at 10:30am or later. All while on a very handsome day rate. Great gig!
Agreed. Hotdesking is always a joy for me, because nobody prepares a desk even if they know I'm coming since a week before. So it's always "Where do I sit ?" and a half-hour wait being paid to watch them scurry around trying to find a desk. Then, of course, there is the time wasted to walk from my desk to the guy I'm working with to clarify points or request data, then there's the time wasted to go find the manager and keep him updated, etc...
So, sometimes I'm being paid to walk around for half a day. If there's really a lot of work, that means I come back another day and we start all over again.
Yeah, that's us as well, for contractors and students.
As a key position here I'm in a secure room with two huge cubes on opposite sides of a small corridor.
They tried to get me to move to the main bldg once when the Managers changed and I threatened to quit.
Not one to be argued with he was let into my area, saw the twelve plus oversized monitors, towers and server racks all neatly setup around me and it dawned on him that he had no idea what I do here. He then realized plans don't always match RL.
A problem known to all victims - hotdesking is pants.
Its only purpose is to give normally absent staff (sales droids, field techs..) somewhere to work when they have to come in.
Minimising any disruption to the workplace and therefore the work being done seems to be stating the obvious - everyone flapping around everyday is the complete opposite.
"They found conversations between staff fell by 70 per cent when they moved to an open plan space, while emails increased dramatically."
Open Plan does not equal hotdesking. I have never worked in anything but an open plan office and find that sometimes the numerous conversations can be very distracting.
Open plan also allows you to see if someone is actually at their desk so you can go and speak to them, not like the cubicle farms the yanks seem to love so much.
Around here in our hanger-sized open-plan hell it seems to be the rule that the less work-related the conversation, the louder it has to be. We have some young ladies who are notorious for this and there is evidence people check their calendars before deciding if the should work from home as on days the ladies are absent we have around double the number of people in the office.
Way back when, many of the places I worked used the "bullpen" layout. No cubes but row after row of desks that were assigned. Noisy, yes. Lack of privacy, yes. Able for a "team" to have conversations, yes. At some point, cubes became the order of the day and everyone was happy.
This hotdesk concept seems to be a throwback to those times of before cubes but without the mental security of knowing where you'll work.
Given that bean counters like to have cost codes for everything, how about they set up cost codes for the following so that they can analyse the effectiveness of the hot desking platform.
Group 1 - Hotdesk users
1. Locating a hotdesk / Evicting that person who hasn't booked it but swears blind that they have
2. Cleaning up the hotdesk so its habitable - yesterdays lunch, coffee cups and random stationary
3. Configuring the hotdesk so that the monitors work properly and are positioned properly
4. Finding a working chair
5. Using the booking app (login time, navigation time etc) Also covers when its busy / down / retries etc.
Group 2 - Remote workers
5. Remote working set-up time - sitting in my office, firing up remote access.
Now lets see what the cost analysis shows about efficiencies
Given that bean counters like to have cost codes for everything,
Whole nother kettle of ball games there.
Hald the time cost codes were a joke when I was working full time
Because either the purchase doesn't fit into any of the categories, or it fits into several.
Maybe they're OK in generic admin office. But for front line local authority staff things seldom seemed to fit so neatly. So finding the appropriate cost code for, I dunno, an administration manual for an educational assessment pack. Which didn't come under books ( not a book - and anyway books came under a different cost centre and we couldn't order them or somesuch.). Nor assessment materials ( these had to be recorded separately) or teaching materials ( another specific cost centre).
So they went under "misc." Cue stroppy emails from bean counters about too many items being put under "misc" but of course no suggestion what they should be under.
I'm all for less "Conversations/Interaction", and more working and actually getting more work done. Off topic conversation, isn't work. But the thing I dispose most is the "CC Everyone on Everything" nonsense that causes me to delete more e-mail than I read. I don't need to know what everyone is doing, if it doesn't actually involve me or require me to do something. It's not my job to track what anyone else is doing. I'm plenty productive on my own without "productivity inhibitors".
I am the opposite. I love going through my inbox looking for the stragglers of spam and "not at work today" auto replies that I missed deleting.
My email archive is pretty light. Only stuff that matters is kept. Crap about drinks after work, binned. New baby announcements, binned. spam and automatic replies go direct to /dev/null/
Everything else is sorted in IMAP folders. I manually sort as there really isnt much to sort after the crap is deleted.
Oh and I love compacting my data files. Working here for nearly 5 years my mailbox size is just scraping 4GB. My mind boggles how many users I see have sizes up to 60!
"CC Everyone on Everything" I stop CC to me by the simple note back stating: "If you had to print a copy, put it in an addressed envelope and pay for a stamp would you have copied this to me? - If the answer is no why have you copied this email to me!" Works every time :-)
Re-read the sentence with the "wearable monitor" about five-six times trying to figure out how one is supposed to be working using one of those before I finally figured out these are likely not of the Full-HD or 4K kind. Anyway, about the reduction of personal contact - hardly surprising. If I'm trying to push you off a ledge, you'll be grasping for support a helluva lot more frenetically than if you just stood there out of your own will or were allowed to not go closer to it than you had to in the first place...
Using the power of maths (220 working days) gives a total of 66 hours a year, or nearly two working weeks.
My working week is defined as 40 hours, so 66 hours is 1.65 working weeks. I think calling that "nearly two working weeks" is stretching it a little.
On the other hand, where does 220 working days come from? 52 * 5 = 260 week days. Take away eight public holidays leaving 252. 252 - 220 = 32. Who in office world gets 32 days (nearly seven working weeks ;-) paid holiday a year?! I must be in the wrong job!
You must be American.
Most of my British friends who work in tech get 30+ days off a year - by law, the minimum is 20 days off plus 8 statutory holidays, and none of this "accruing the days per paycheck/que" - you get the full lot on January 1.
Nobody gets fewer holidays than the US (statutory requirement is zero, normal is 10-18).
Read this and weep - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_by_country
and none of this "accruing the days per paycheck/que"
Theoretically, you do accrue annual leave. If you take more than half the days off but leave 6 months into the annual leave period, you pay back the extra days taken out of your redundancy pay. If you've not taken all your accrued days for the time period you've worked, you get paid for those days not taken. At least that's been the case in every job I've had in the last 40 years, both public and private sector.
I've worked in a semi open plan office, and what happens is since the noise carries so much everyone uses headphones or earplugs to block out the noise. And it is uncomfortable to have a conversation, even a work one, as you know you're bothering everyone within earshot.
So to avoid breaking the library-like silence you will IM with the person next to you, and send emails all day long. It's really isolating and demotivating as each person is their own island. And if your cellphone rings you get to run to find a phone room, wasting a lot of time in the process.
Except for the sales teams who love the open plan and chatter all day long.
We're in an open plan office, but when we arrived in this building, the sales got their own office, so they can discuss to their hearth's content without disturbing us peons. But it always feels weird when I receive an email/IM from a colleague sitting 4 m away (and since it usually starts a conversation, it doesn't change anything)
"'ve worked in a semi open plan office, and what happens is since the noise carries so much everyone uses headphones or earplugs to block out the noise. And it is uncomfortable to have a conversation, even a work one, as you know you're bothering everyone within earshot.
So to avoid breaking the library-like silence you will IM with the person next to you, and send emails all day long. It's really isolating and demotivating as each person is their own island. And if your cellphone rings you get to run to find a phone room, wasting a lot of time in the process.
Except for the sales teams who love the open plan and chatter all day long."
BINGO! THAT is a description of our office... from the library like silence to the IM'ing the person to you to the getting a personal phone call and running out of the office to take it....
"actively encourages staff to work from home!"
So they pay a portion of your rent/mortgage to cover the space you use, along with paying your heating/lighting/electricity costs, along with your broadband bill and wear and tear on your office equipment?
Working from home is used by beancounters for THEIR benefit not yours, even though that's not how they spin it!
I've worked from home for over 15 years now and its non-negotiable for me.
Boss may not pay mortgage and utilities (they do pay for broadband) but I buy petrol/gas once a month and drive about 5000 miles a year. Before my commute was 40-90+ minutes each way.
I'll take the loss of driving/commute stress as payment for all of the other things. Plus I get way more done as there's no need for small talk, coffee drinking, or useless meetings
I spent three months working at a "remote location" for a company located in Birmingham (UK). I used to leave the house at 7:00 AM, drive 99 miles in two hours, arriving at the remote office in time to start at 9:00. I had half an hour for lunch, and left at 5:00 PM to drive 99 miles in two hours home, arriving at 7:00 PM. I was paid a generous petrol mileage rate, plus lunch every day, so I took home more money from my expenses that I did from my salary. Unfortunately, this contract ended after 3 months, and I was then based at Head Office in Solihull, which was about 30 miles from home, and took about three quarters of an hour travelling time, neither of which I was paid for.
"Working from home is used by beancounters for THEIR benefit not yours, even though that's not how they spin it!"
While I don't disagree with what you're saying, if you normally travel by public transport into a large, crowded metropolis and it takes you a few hours each day, the benefit can significantly weigh in your favour.
For London, WFH saves me around £30/day travel, whatever I spend on food and gives me back 3 hours. Any costs I incur at home is tiny in comparision
Daughter works for NHS and is often out and about working in schools and early learning centres. She can come home to do her admin, write reports etc., which means not having to waste time driving back to a crowded office ( not enough space if they're all in) or battle the rush hour traffic at end of day, which takes three times as long and uses much more fuel.
She gets to sit in comfort, listen to music if she wants, receive deliveries even. It's just a win for all.
That being said, I could also have worked from home, when I was working in an education department. But the managers wouldn't allow it, because they didn't trust us to do our work. Highly skilled and motivated professionals, but they couldn't trust us. As if we could magically have failed to write our assessment reports and do our admin without it being noticed instantly*. F'ing idiots!
*Or at least, no more likely than as we could have while being in the office pretending to work!
"the company actively encourages staff to work from home!"
From home or at home? It's not necessarily the same thing. Someone covering, for whatever, reason, a geographical area remote from the company office may work from home but seldom be at home. Sales is the obvious example but not the only one. My daughter works in clinical trials and spends a good deal of time at the participating hospitals; the company office is only occasionally visited.
Hot-desking has zero to do with costs and flexibility and is solely there for upper management to remind the drones that you are interchangeable, expendable and no one would notice much if you were not there tomorrow.
Obviously the same upper management have to have private offices because of confidentiality and all that stuff.
Upper management aren't clever enough to play mind games like that. It's all about cost - not providing permanent fixed facilities for all those wanting them is cheaper.
The upper management private office thing is (slowly) disappearing. One of the US tech giants for whom I worked went from private offices for upper management to cubes - large cubes, but still cubes.
Our company set up Yammer a while back. It was allowed run "freely" for a couple months and quite a few staff treated it like their personal Twitter or Facebook accounts. Eventually, people were "reminded" that this was meant for business use. That went ok for a while then eventually tailed off to almost nothing. At least in the company wide group and the groups I was auto-subscribed to. I'd not be surprised to find the sales and marketing groups are full of back slapping and similar messages. They probably think the rest of the company still use it too. I checked it a while back. Not even Tumbleweeds any more.
I was contracting for a company that 'did' hotdesking.
One day I spent about half an hour trying to find a desk. Within twenty minutes of sitting down someone else appeared claiming to have booked the desk. As a contractor I didn't have access to the booking system.
I spent another thirty minutes unsuccessfully looking for another desk before I locked up my laptop and went to the cinema for the afternoon. I still booked the time.
Not sorry.
I visited a giant corporation in the Netherlands, distinctive glass building. Everyone but the CEO (nice office!) did hot desking in open-plan without partitions. On arrival, you wheeled your parked filing cabinet to the desk/screen that was free. So liberating! BUT... everyone knew perfectly well that the higher ranks liked windows, so no one else would sit there, and everything was actually stratified in a complex but invisible way
So, you had a cube with a desk and a chair to start.
Then they took it away, to be "productive".
Now, they want you to beg for a chair to be allowed permission to work?
We had an open office inflicted on a couple of floors two years ago. People complained, but execs were firm. After a year of listening to "well if it's so great, why don't you use it?", a few execs actually did.
Within two days, barrages of all-company emails were being sent out by executives who were shocked to discover that all of the things that they said never happened were, in fact, happening all the time.
The "quiet" 40db office was in fact closer to 85db, according to a noise meter they installed. The "huddle rooms" for meetings were useless, since the first people to get in in the morning barricaded themselves in there in order to be able to do some damned work. And rather than talking to each other, the noise levels were so bad that three people sitting next to each other were writing 100+ long email chains during the day to solve problems that would take 30 seconds of direct communication. And they were horrified to discover that most people were completely incommunicado, choosing to put on sound-deadening headphones and tuning out all distractions, including management, upon arrival.
Perhaps not co-incidentally, previous plans to continue the adoption of the open office on other floors doesn't get mentioned any more.
Luckily I have never had to hot desk, and I am very protective of my personal space on the desk I already have.
Although I keep calm when someone "borrows" my chair, this when I arrive I find I have to stand towering above everyone, internally I'm boiling over. I even thought about chaining my char to my desk!
What I really hate is open plan offices. I spent some work experience time in an office that still used cubicles. Yep, the panels were a horrid colour and the lights were urine yellow but it was wonderful. The panels baffled the inane noises that constantly distract my aspergers mind and allowed the IT team to be with the IT team. Anyone outside had to come in.
Then I started working in an open plan office. Oh there were short barriers between a few of the desks but they did nothing to block out the sound of peopel eating crisps or scraping a spoon in a bowl to scrape up every last particle of the breakfast they should have had before they left home, like I did. The whole place is full of useless information fired out in all directions from other departments. Some people even have headsets so they can wander around chatting loudly to a customer right next to you while you are working on a 3rd line IT problem or trying to bring back a DFS replicated file server that has annoyingly decided to go out of sync.
The managers also used to demand that nobody used headphones. Everyone ignores that rule and its the only respite I get.
A little while ago the entire IT team ended up with our own office / small building a short walk from the main building. It was total bliss. We were only bothered by visitors who actually had a problem, and not those who forgot how to delete a file or how to rename a file after you gave them a new laptop. We even had parking spaces just outside. We had to move back though due to company restructuring. A new head office is being built, once we muscled in on the design meetings and demanded enough space for a few racks (they were going to give us a small cupboard on the stairs as they though we wont need any room as its all in the cloud). The new office is open plan, again, and the walls are basically full glass windows so anyone from the street can see us.
I think I'll try and hide in that cupboard.
Open plan is a pain but it's cheap to implement so sadly it is here to stay, even though it probably costs more in distraction than would putting up partitions and having, say, four people to an office.
Hotdesking is a catastrophe and costs a fortune. Show your staff how valued they are by treating them like disposable paper towels and forbidding them from personalizing their own spaces. As the article says, make them faff about for hours on end before they can start doing anything useful. Make sure nobody can find anyone else to have a face-to-face.
One of my favourite gigs was when I was the head BOFH and had a huge horseshoe desk at one end of the subduly lit CAD office, with the mech eng manager similarly equipped at the other end and the draughtsmen (and women) in the middle on their, in those day, VAX VMS workstations. Access to the office was via a keycoded door so the proles had to phone or email to get permission to bug us in person. The company had recently introduced a no smoking policy but we were all terrible addicts and basically made our own rules since the CAD office had the best air-con anyway. (I've since quit smoking but it was fun at the time not having to stand on the fire escape in the rain like the rest of the afflicted.)
Despite the chain smoking I didn't half get a lot of work done.
"Those were the days, my friend."
And ( the first part of) that sums up bean counter thinking. They don't calculate intangibles, not even opportunity cost. Only cash-in cash-out costs. So staff productivity isn't part of their calculations. Nor is turn over. Those are a different team's problem. They'll look at the cost of the product or service, and try to reduce costs further. Potentially leading to downwards spiral as working conditions get worse and recruitment costs increase.
And if customer facing ( c.f. BHS) they'll run down the customer "experience" to save a few bob, thinking the punters won't notice that the paintwork is looking tired or the lighting isn't all on. Or that there aren't any staff available to help you find what you need.
Indeed yeah, hot desking has not quirte please experience for a lot. Companies are coming up with better to solve this isse, I have seen companies like Wework, ikeva, The Executive Center are putting efforts to solve this issue, which are quite famous when compared to the old traditional offices. The demand for these offices is increasing due to fully furnished space and availability of more equipment like the internet, meeting rooms, printers, telephones, conference rooms, and manythings.
Hotdesking is yet the option if you are linking for then, I had bunch of friends who had taken from The Executive Center they provide great service for hotdesking, in Chennai and Bangalore.
It’s that time where the world is accepting a new normal. And that applies to not just our lifestyle but to our changing work practices as well. You’d think a nearby Starbucks or a quiet coffee shop would make for a perfect make-shift office, but a shared workspace delivers much more than that.
The world around us is caught in a hustle, to get ahead, to chase a dream, to conquer the far-fetched.
Apart from shared workspaces, The Executive Center provide the hot desk in Pune which is a growing trend that has been increasingly seen in collaborative workspaces.
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