Are hotdesks always hellish?

If you want to create a successful workplace, you need to rethink the requirements of your employees, so says Leesman, an organisation that specialises in making workplaces better , in their latest research published this week.

Most organisations are somewhere along the journey of reducing their office footprint - and with that comes the decision of whether to switch to hotdesks. Leesman wanted to understand what workers preferred - and what led to that sentiment.

Leesman’s key findings:

• Very few organisations are using their offices for more than three days a week
• As a results two-thirds of organisations are planning to reduce their office footprint in the next 18 months
• Workers can be happy with hot desks but the most important consideration is the variety of spaces for them to work in
• A successful hotdesk workplace needs to take full account of the needs of those who struggle without an assigned seat
• More details below and you can download the full Leesman report here

It’s worth reminding you that Leesman are the experts in this, having surveyed over 1.3m office users in their search to understand what excellence looks like. Their latest wave of data looked at 1591 workplaces, scoring each with a Leesman Index score (styled as Lmi). Any score over 70 is regarded as strong. In their latest wave organisations which had assigned seating were on average happier places - scoring an Lmi of 69.6, compared to an average of 68.2 for hotdesk environments. But hotdesk workplaces could be happier than assigned desk workplaces - the key factor was the provision of a ‘good variety’ of places to get work done. The Lmi for hotdesk workplaces with variety was 72.8.

Full a full breakdown of the Leesman report - and an insight into the rest of the data check out the full post on Substack.

• A few months ago I covered the fact that the outgoing Conservative government blocked an idea by Cambridgeshire council to experiment with 4-day working as a means of making their roles more attractive in the jobs’ market. This week Angela Rayner approved the proposal . This is really important from the perspective of the public sector. The roles were struggling to pay a competitive market rate to attract candidates - by using a 4-day configuration it could be a way to manage budgets while offering working terms that commercial organisations don’t choose to offer.
• Another Bezos business goes all-in on RTO as Washington Post staff are summoned back to the office 5 days a week from 2025 . Meanwhile Asda has insisted on a 3 day return for its team members
• In contrast Pinterest are seeing their flexibility as a way to attract top talent in the job market leading to a 90% increase in applications
• Coverage of the research I put out last week , and more

Tiffany Gaskell outlines coaching as a route to transformational leadership

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There's a key consideration about the modern manager given to us by the Gallup Global Workplace Report, 80% of those who are engaged with their jobs say they've received direct feedback from their manager in the last week . This is a powerful insight but also poses a huge challenge - how can any of us find the time to observe and then feedback to every worker in our team. Tiffany explains that this is where a culture of coaching comes in, transferring the burden of observation from the manager to facilitating a socratic questioning approach. In this week’s news financial company Synchrony claim their own coaching culture is one of the reasons for their recent success .

Tiffany Gaskell is the co-author of Coaching for Performance , the top-selling guide to coaching first published by Sir John Whitmore the inventor of the discipline.

It's curious to consider that there was a founder of coaching, and Tiffany takes me through the history of the practice, how it took hold and where it is today. How can any of us achieve transformation by using a coaching approach.

You can follow Tiffany on LinkedIn and the book is out now .