A Perspective On Hot-Desking

First they came for the walls around your workstation to leave your desk and workplace possessions contained within a neat but exposed compact cubicle

- Gary Martin

Now your boss might be coming back for your desk, too.

Hot-desking, or the practice of arriving at work each day without having a regular desk to call your own, is making a return in many workplaces to reignite heated debate on the so-called merits of arguably one of the biggest management mistakes in history.

Somehow, someone somewhere managed to earn big dollars convincing our brightest leaders that taking away dedicated work spaces for employees to allow everyone to muck in together was great for productivity.

The rest, as they say, is history – the hot-desker was born.

Prior to the pandemic, hotdesking experienced a peak in popularity – certainly with employers. Bosses increasingly saw it as an ideal way to cram the workforce into a smaller space and, in doing so, make considerable savings in leasing costs.

Besides, mixing people up was supposed to build better bonds between staff, improve communications and collaboration and make everyone more efficient.