Hot desking is a form of workplace seating where employees are not assigned with permanent and fixed desks anymore. They come in to the office and just take whatever seat that is available to them. This type of seat arrangement is common in co-working space.
The general idea behind this seating arrangement is to save space and thus operating cost. Imagine you have 50 employees and there is hardly a day where everyone is reporting to the office. Some may be on annual leave, some on sick leave and one of your part-time employees are not coming in for the day. Hence, you do not need a desk for everyone.
By reducing the number of furniture and office equipment, you probably can save some costs on office rental. However, how true is this? Let’s see what are the problems associated with hot desking.
You Can Never Find the Person
By occupying a different seat every day, either on the same or different floor, it will be very hard for you to know where your team members are and this deter effective collaboration.
Staff Feel Less Valued
People love to sit at the same place, having familiar surroundings and people. Hot desking forces employees to make more decisions unnecessarily, be it consciously or unconsciously on a daily basis. This creates anxiety and stress because it makes people run out of decision fatigue through the course of the day.
Less Productive
Please imagine again. You came in to the office, opened your locker, dragged your belongings out, searched for a seat, managed to get one, you considered by observing the surroundings and the neighboring people and finally decided to take it. After a few hours, you realized that it was just not the right seating for the day. Because the area was simply too noisy for you to focus on the task that needed greater concentration and brain power to complete. You were in the dilemma whether you should keep all your stuff, re-try your luck at another desk and re-start all over again.
This non-productivity at individual role as well as team level can be expensive for the company indirectly. It prevents people from performing at their best.
Employees’ Personality
Introvert and extrovert respond differently to hot desking. Generally, introvert prefers a quieter and familiar surrounding and people.
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