Will ‘hot-desking’ be the cool thing?

Will ‘hot-desking’ be the cool thing?

Do you think of your work desk as your own private property or do you prefer to sit in a different seat each day? With more firms ‘hot-desking’, you may not have a choice. Helen Conway reports

Imagine working in an office where you do not have a desk you can call your own.

There is nowhere to pin your George Clooney photo, your Manchester United sticker or your postcard from Carlos, the Spanish waiter you met in Benalmadena last summer.

Such is the scenario in an office where ‘hot-desking’ is in operation. If you haven’t come across the term yet, then pay heed as this working practice could be coming your way soon.

In brief, the verb ‘to hot-desk’ – otherwise known as ‘location independent working’, ‘virtual office’ and ‘hotelling’ – was created in the early ’90s to describe the situation where workers in a company are not allocated their own space in an office.

Instead, it is a case of first come first served, so whoever is in the office uses any desk which is available.

Once at your ‘hot desk’, you key in your personal code to the telephone on the desk.

This tells the switchboard where you are so all your calls can be routed to you.

Once you have used your password to log on to the computer terminal, you are ready to start work.

The point of a hot-desking policy is that there are always fewer desks than workers but it is not a case of having to play musical chairs every morning so that the last one in has to stand for the day.

Hot-desking only applies in companies where on any given day a significant number of employees are working away from the office.

A good example is a company which employs a large sales force.

Throughout the week, most of the team will be out on the road visiting clients and customers and it would be a rare occurrence for all sales people to be in at the same time.

Increasingly, companies feel that in this type of situation where they have a transient workforce it makes perfect sense to reduce the size of the office by reducing the number of desks made available to employees.

Why allocate permanent space to people who are hardly ever in and so hardly ever use it?

The result is cost savings on the size of the office, which means savings on ground rent, and also savings on office furniture which can be hefty when you include computer terminals and all the paraphernalia which goes with them.

If a third of a company’s workforce are always out at any one time, then the cost reductions from reducing the size of the office infrastructure can be considerable.

Within the travel industry, British Airways is very much a proponent of the ‘hot-desking’ way of working in its state-of-the-art building.

In virtually every department in the building, there are a number of desks which are nominated as ‘hot desks’ to be used as and when the need arises.

According to one report, the working practice is not universally popular with BA staff and it is easy to see why.

The biggest gripe among hot-deskers is the fact that it means that the ‘hot-desking’ employee has no personal office space and when they are away from the office they have to clear the desk completely and put all their personal papers and belongings away in a locker or filing cabinet.

For the employee used to personalising their own area and leaving a desk piled high with clutter, that kind of system is a nightmare.

Nevertheless, despite the feelings of employees, it appears ‘hot-desking’ is here to stay. If it saves the company money, then there is no option and you will just have to save George Clooney for the fridge at home.

Final frontier: personal office space is starting to become a thing of the past

Plug-and-play: ‘hot-desking’ can cost companies a lot less in resources