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My current employer has an "Activity Bases Working" philosophy. This means we hot-desk. We do not get an assigned desk. We are likely to sit somewhere differ
by fian 5y ago
My current employer has an "Activity Bases Working" philosophy.
This means we hot-desk. We do not get an assigned desk. We are likely to sit somewhere different every day you go to the office. We each get a personal locker to store items so we don't have to carry everything to/from the office each day. The desk each have at least one monitor, most have two, they are easily adjusted by height/left right and viewing angle. Each desk also has a keyboard and mouse and a USB docking station. Each desk is cleaned nightly. There are disinfecting wipes available if you feel the need to wipe down the keyboard or mouse when you arrive. Some of the desks are height adjustable. There are a few standing desks for floor as well.
Generally we are organised into semi-autonomous squads of 8-12 people though sometimes larger squads are formed. Each squad has a nominated set of desks they can claim for collaborative work. Anyone can come and sit in a squad's area if there is a free desk available. This allows for easy inter-team collaboration when required. Someone from another team can come and sit with us to work through how we will interface/integrate between our respective services.
We also have meeting rooms and other spaces available we can go work in when we need somewhere to deeply focus or have longer discussion that might impact others.
This works quite well. No one is very possessive of any particular desk or location. If you get in late sometimes you may not be able to sit with your team. Though you have the right to ask someone to move out of your teams designated area if you really do need to collaborate with your team mates.
One exception is for people that have strict ergonomic requirements. They will be assigned a dedicated desk and chair set up for their needs that don't get changed.
I don't ever feel possessive of a desk I might be using. I don't feel the need to leave things on my desk for the next day. There is a slight time cost to going to/from your locker and adjusting the monitors and chair each day to your liking - but that time is on the clock.
The biggest challenge with this arrangement is when we do increment planning. Every squad is trying to do increment planning at the same time so finding a meeting room or space becomes very challenging. Due to Covid, we have done a lot of remote working over the past couple of years and have become more adept at running meetings over Teams. So finding a physical meeting room has become less of an issue.
- xkqd 5y agoI’ve done this before at my last F20. I heard the whole story from the beginning. Increased collaboration. Flexibility. Variety. But at no point did they level with the staff that it was only about reducing costs. It was about maximizing space used, letting folks hot desk knowing that on any given day 15% of the workforce would be out. With that little fact, you could allocate 115% to a given building. Yep, we get it, we’re adults. Gotta keep the costs down for the shareholders. But hey instead let’s bullshit and lie to your workforce and pretend it’s actually about collaboration. So to be clear… You don’t feel possessive over a desk because you have no domain to link physical comfort too. No place to put your family photos on. No place to look forward to sitting down at, knowing that the only constant of the work day will be where you’re physically located. No place to call your own. You have no dominion. You have no place to call your own. You have no authority over the environment around you, that you’re going to sink thousands of hours in ever year. Yeah, I’m sure we’re get old and look back on this fondly.
- fian 5y agoAt a previous job, I has an assigned desk and I was expected to work from the office unless I had good reason to work from home. I definitely had dominion over my desk. To the point I built my own sub-base to raise the normal sitting desk up to be a fixed standing desk. I bought my own drafting chair so I could stand or sit comfortably without needing to raise or lower the desk. So I have experience taking the authority over my environment a lot further than most. In that role I was a solo developer attached loosely to a team of engineers. I had a fixed set of collaborators ( though most of them in other countries and timezone) for over a decade. I had no need to adapt my working location based on who I was collaborating with over time. For my current employer, I will soon move to my fourth team and project in about 2.5 years. I regularly have a different set of collaborators to work with for short terms sub-projects. This means I often change where I locate at the office to better collaborate for the work at hand. So yeah, for me it is about collaboration. Re-locating for the short term doesn't come with negotiating anyone else's strong territorial claim over a desk. Sure it probably costs the company less to hot desk. My current employer, however, does truly embrace remote working and the majority of employees take advantage of that to not commute to the office every work day. Not much point maintaining a dedicated desk that you only occupy 2-3 days per week. Different employers may hot-desk but get remote working wrong or keep people in fixed projects for very long times. If my employer required clock in at my desk ready to work and clock off didn't include returning things to my locker it wouldn't be so great. I can appreciate hot-desking may not be so great for those cases.