The future of the office is hotdesking... sort of
Hotdesking often receives a bad press. Some love it and some hate it, but our experience with hotdesking may just come in handy in a Covid-19 world of flexible working. Before rushing to replace the ‘traditional’ office with a more flexible version, we must first reflect on the past in order to make the office a success in the future.
I have experienced hotdesking and flexible working environments in several organisations and I believe those experiences broadly fall into two groups, depending on the motivation behind the policy.
1. The space saver. The first approach is to consider what office space you have. Let’s say you have 'lots of sqft' with desks for everyone. You carry out a study that identifies that the office is only ever half full at any one time.
The Solution is to introduce a hotdesking policy across the organisation. The Bad news is that people lose their own desk space. But the good news is that you halve your office space and enjoy a huge cost saving.
2. The human experience. The second approach is to consider what the office means to your staff. You recognise that people like working in different ways, teams are fluid as work becomes more project based and the environment they work in impacts on their physical and mental health. Some like it noisy, others don’t, some want to work from home twice a week, some prefer the buzz of the office.
The solution is to introduce policies that focus on flexibility, on freeing up your people and providing them what they need as individuals to do their job. This still means that some people may no longer have their own desk, but you end up with a happier, healthier and more motivated workforce. Ultimately, it is more productive.
I would wager that most people reading this who don’t like hotdesking are in a space that was designed with the first approach in mind, those that do are in the second. And, by following the second approach, there is still a pretty good chance you’ll reduce the space you need giving you the cost saving that others started with.
So, as we come out of our enforced flexible working experiment, what lessons can we learn from our previous hotdesking experience?
Well, if you plan on introducing new ways of working just so you can reduce your footprint by half, it may not work. You will end up with a smaller office with disengaged and less productive staff longing for their old desk.
If, on the other hand, you focus on what individual people want to do their jobs – flexibility and choice, then we may just get a better office environment. The second approach, which puts the human at the centre of the policy, has to be the way forward.
That means recognising that different people have different needs; some people like a noisy place, some prefer to work in an Anechoic chamber. Others have noise preferences dependent on the task that they are doing (my work playlists range from trance, to heavy rock, to classical and at other times, I just need like silence depending on the task that I am doing.) It’s about understanding that technology is taking some of the routine out of our roles and making human interaction across an office a vital element of our days. And its about making ‘water cooler’ moments as appealing as a home brewed coffee at home.
The future of the workforce is not about where we work, but our wellbeing and productivity. The office building will continue to play a major role in this, but as a sector we have a choice as to whether we make decisions based on reducing costs, or serving people. We have seen from hotdesking approaches in the past that the driver for this change is critical to its success.
Of course, as we do work on a more human centric basis, we need to consider beyond the office. To be successful, we also need to consider the whole system. People will work from home, a café, a client’s office, an airport, on the train. It is a change in mindset that we are going to have to work really hard at and to be truly successful, this may mean changing the structure of the sector.
The property sector has an unprecedented opportunity to redefine the built environment to better serve people. If we get this right, we may just improve peoples mental and physical health, happiness, reduce the impact on the environment and increase workforce productivity.
No pressure then.