I’ve Never Been A Fan

It’s all the rage these days but it is all that good? Personally, I find it disruptive and destructive to productivity. Familiarity and consistency are huge productivity boosts and hot-desking removes a lot of those freedoms.

• Things like keeping personal items at work
  • Snacks to avoid having to waste time buying/packing them every day
  • Having hanging/packing space for clothes to make running to work easier
• Not knowing where to sit, end up walking around trying to work out whether the half empty coffee cup means that someone left it there from last night or someone has actually claimed the spot
  • People just end up sitting in the same place anyway and then get annoyed when other people take that place.
• Quite useful to know where someones desk is
• Changing equipment: some desks don’t have screens, or keyboards, or the chairs are at different heights

It’s not all bad…

I can see some very good upsides to this way of working

• Freedom to move
  • Co-location with team easier
  • Might prefer different environment e.g. Lighter, darker, warmer, etc
• Higher utilisation of office space
• Lower over heads of managing who sits where

Conclusion

I really still don’t like it; the productivity loses are just far far too great to make up for the desk utilisation positive. Maybe I’m missing something as it seems to be so prevalent. I guess just because everyone is doing it doesn’t make it a good idea