> This trend happened when the 'open plan' needed a next level of hell.
I seem to remember Dilbert explaining this as a way to ensure employees felt more like company-owned sacks of potatoes than actual humans. Hot-desking really does seem like one of the most dehumanizing office designs I can think of.
I know the supposed benefits of open offices, but I'm not even sure what hot-desking claims to achieve? Except in call centers I guess, where it's explicitly "to speed up firing people".
Hot desking (or Hoteling as I've heard it called) makes a lot of sense for the headquarters office of traveling consultants. These folks are usually at the client's location Monday-Thursday and back at their local headquarters on Friday. However, there's a huge amount of variation in terms of travel scheduling so having an assigned desk doesn't make much sense. For example, consider a consultant living in LA who's working on a project in the Chicago suburbs. Most Fridays are spent working from LA (either at the office or at home), but sometimes you'll need to take meetings with Chicago people. Hot desking makes it easy to find a place to work for the day because all the Chicago people that are working from home or are at a remote office aren't taking up desks.
For permanent non-traveling roles, I don't immediately see the advantage though.
It's mostly for environments in which the company's short on space and a lot of employees don't routinely come into the office. Hot desking eliminates permanently provisioning office space that may be only used for one day in five or ten.
If that's not the problem being solved, I'm not sure what is. Now no one knows where anyone is sitting and teams are at least theoretically all scattered around.
I'm pretty sure this is the correct explanation. We have a site that recently moved to this setup, and I know for a fact that there are roughly 20% fewer seats than employees. That's what they came up with as acceptable after crunching the numbers on absentee rate.
> I know the supposed benefits of open offices, but I'm not even sure what hot-desking claims to achieve? Except in call centers I guess, where it's explicitly "to speed up firing people".
In call centers, there's another reason: if the company gets big enough, they may have more employees than desks. Since call centers work on shifts, not everyone is going to be in the office at the same time, and so they just lay down a policy of "nobody has their own desk".
I seem to remember Dilbert explaining this as a way to ensure employees felt more like company-owned sacks of potatoes than actual humans. Hot-desking really does seem like one of the most dehumanizing office designs I can think of.
I know the supposed benefits of open offices, but I'm not even sure what hot-desking claims to achieve? Except in call centers I guess, where it's explicitly "to speed up firing people".