Hotly desking

We're moving to a hot-desking system at my work. Not everyone is happy, including me. I've found myself getting a bit contrary in the face of the glib enthusaism with which it's being presented. Yay, we can break down silos, save money, and be all cool and modern. Scepticism feels churlish against such big-hitting benefits, but I can't hep but question them.

Silos don't develop out of cussedness, they develop when the actual work in one part of a buisness is quite specialised and opaque to other parts. The tasks of the IT staff, the finance team and the marketers are important, but best left to them, as they call on specialist skills and knowledge sets. They will still sit together if they possibly can. With people who sympathise with the particular annoyances of their particular tasks.

Saving money by evicting your staff may cost more down the road, when the introverts' stress levels start turning into sickness absence and the extroverts multiplied opportunities to socialise at work start to eat into productivity. And being modern? Well, pfff. That's not a benefit in itself, surely?

Hot desks are impersonal desks. The accretion of notes and print offs which transform an office desk from an item of furniture to an extension of an employee's memory must go. If there is no fixed place waiting for you in the morning, how much of your time is going to be spent identifying where you will sit, who you will sit next to and then settling in. Yes, inevitably you will be interacting more with other colleagues. But people will still try to sit with friends, and colleagues with compatible work habits and for less extroverted people, this will charge the whole business of arriving for work with social anxiety. You can get in early and pick your desk, but then you can't relax until the nearby desks are taken by compatible colleagues. If someone you find really difficult to work near decides to sit next to you, you're trapped unless you actually pack up and move away. That seems like a real energy cost. Every day.

And then everyone who doesn't naturally work with a clear desk (that's most people) will need to spend some time unpacking a large bag of their notes, files, mugs and pens onto their desk. Rebooting their external memory. A real time cost, on top of the usual coffee-making and greetings. Every day. To say nothing about the times that something gets left behind.

What hot desking is doing under the radar is separating the personal and organisational. On the face of it that feels like a good thing. Morally hygenic. People with regular desks begin to nest, and as they get comfortable they absorb the organisation into their identity. They feel part of their workplace, and that their workplace is part of them. They populate their desks with reminders and photos, stabilise their relastionships with desk-neighbours, and probably don't see a problem in spending time socialising, or using the office printer for party invites. They feel comfortable, and some people will slack off.

But in fighting back against the nesting you risk commodifying the whole relationship: displaced employees feel like 'human resources' rather than part of the organisation, and then the organisation becomes a resource in turn: a means to gain salary, professional opportunities, and stationery supplies.

Nobody thinks that the phrase 'in it for what you can get' describes a good state of affairs. Even if the place does look tidier and cost less to run.

Taking pictures, giving attention

A while back I started an instagram feed. The plan was to post a daily photo showing city nature: the invited guests, the gatecrashers and all the enrichments of weather and time in the urban environment. I thought it would be a new way for me to bang on about how nature is everywhere, all the time. After all, it's probably time my friends and family got a rest from being  sole audience for my 'Ooo look!' moments.

But something unexpected happened, two things really. One is that by setting this most minute of intentions I have turned my passive attention into active looking. I am seeing more.

The second and more important change happened after a week or so when I reviewed the images as a group. The nature moments in my life have so far been entirely accidental and incidental: a series of interruptions. When I reviewed the first few days' worth of images, 'oo, raindrops',  'look, amazing clouds' suddenly joined up into a thread: a whole narrative of my nature-life came into focus.  Intermittent tapping has resolved into a rhythmn.

I generally think of my life as mostly consisting of my family, job, friends, creative projects, and the routes I usually walk or drive between them. Which is of course what it mostly is, but now I have a much stronger awareness of the physical sub-plot.

When I review my images, I see my life without all the social parts. I bring the physical world I inhabit to the fore - something that my life of relative first world ease allows me to ignore a lot. I don't worry about cold, hunger and pain because I have jumpers, supermarkets and painkillers. The  physical world just doesn't impinge much on my knowledge worker's urban lifestyle, but the physical world is full of incontrovertible truth. It just is. No blame, nothing owed: just physics and biology, playing out.

As the images pile up their glimpses of weeds, gulls and clouds, I am gathering a sense of perspective, a bit like when you look up at the night sky. The distant majesty of stars melts away the hot little immediacies of human life: what does it matter?

Nature photos offer a friendlier dose of perspective than the stars. I matter to the weeds in my drive in a way that I obviously don't to Orion in the sky. I'm not going to decide when to pull him up by the roots to save the brickwork. But social awkwardness, unimpressive cooking, or a messy house are just as irrelevant to the weeds as to Orion. I like them for it. I'm going to keep paying them and their city nature colleagues my photographic attention.

If you want to see what I see, you're very welcome @southamptonstarling