4 ms·

Sounds awful. What better way to make your employees feel like a replaceable cog than to strip any personality from their work environment.

by bengale 10y ago

maxxxxx 10y ago
Are the execs that cook this up part of this or do they keep their (window?) offices?
- brotherjerky 10y ago
  Unlikely. Typically these rules are for the little people.
- tzs 10y ago
  It sounds like there are no window offices. From the article: > Inside, UBS has significantly reduced the number of individual offices, by about 40 percent. None sit against the windows, allowing light throughout the building.
rocky1138 10y ago
They may actually be doing the employees a favour, since it's a false sense of security to think otherwise.
busterarm 10y ago
Given that this is UBS, I think this is, more than any other factor, a way for the company to prevent any way of employees establishing any kind of paper trail. They seem to be getting caught up in scandal after scandal every time some news about something shady going on in the financial industry, the first thing I look for in the article is the letters 'UBS'. Maybe I'm being too negative/tin-foil-hat here.
- wr1472 10y ago
  No paper trail? I'm pretty certain they already use email and digital documents. Allowing them to hotdesk (as this is essentially what it is) is hardly a way to prevent employees establishing a paper trail.
  - r00fus 10y ago
    Digital documents can have established retention periods and mandated purges.
    - dingaling 10y ago
      Indeed, I worked for a financial company that had a 90-day default purge on all e-mails and chat. You could drag some e-mails to a retention folder ( limited in overall size ) but as far as I recall that only protected them for another finite span of time. Anything that needed a longer persistence had to be typed-up into a document and stored in Sharepoint, which was more manageable in terms of legal discovery than individual e-mails.
HillRat 10y ago
Saatchi (edit: might have been Chiat Day as mentioned downthread) tried this back in the '90s, and I think gave it up as a bad idea pretty quickly thereafter. I know some studios that still do hotdesking and reconfigurable workpods, but as far as I'm concerned it's a morale-killer.

Sounds awful. What better way to make your employees feel like a replaceable cog than to strip any personality from their work environment.

by bengale 10y ago

Sounds awful. What better way to make your employees feel like a replaceable cog than to strip any personality from their work environment.

maxxxxx 10y ago

Are the execs that cook this up part of this or do they keep their (window?) offices?

brotherjerky 10y ago
Unlikely. Typically these rules are for the little people.
tzs 10y ago
It sounds like there are no window offices. From the article: > Inside, UBS has significantly reduced the number of individual offices, by about 40 percent. None sit against the windows, allowing light throughout the building.

rocky1138 10y ago

They may actually be doing the employees a favour, since it's a false sense of security to think otherwise.

busterarm 10y ago

Given that this is UBS, I think this is, more than any other factor, a way for the company to prevent any way of employees establishing any kind of paper trail. They seem to be getting caught up in scandal after scandal every time some news about something shady going on in the financial industry, the first thing I look for in the article is the letters 'UBS'. Maybe I'm being too negative/tin-foil-hat here.

wr1472 10y ago
No paper trail? I'm pretty certain they already use email and digital documents. Allowing them to hotdesk (as this is essentially what it is) is hardly a way to prevent employees establishing a paper trail.
- r00fus 10y ago
  Digital documents can have established retention periods and mandated purges.
  - dingaling 10y ago
    Indeed, I worked for a financial company that had a 90-day default purge on all e-mails and chat. You could drag some e-mails to a retention folder ( limited in overall size ) but as far as I recall that only protected them for another finite span of time. Anything that needed a longer persistence had to be typed-up into a document and stored in Sharepoint, which was more manageable in terms of legal discovery than individual e-mails.

HillRat 10y ago

Saatchi (edit: might have been Chiat Day as mentioned downthread) tried this back in the '90s, and I think gave it up as a bad idea pretty quickly thereafter. I know some studios that still do hotdesking and reconfigurable workpods, but as far as I'm concerned it's a morale-killer.