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.