Why do people still pretend open plan/hotdesk offices are good ideas?

[Mightneedencouraged]

Whatever your views on WFH, surely no one can argue that travelling to sit in a communal vat of humanity with no personally designated space, no privacy and no quiet to think is a desirable situation? It's just a maximum profit situation for bastardy landlords.

i like them. I don't mind hotdesking if there is a proper system of booking a desk.

Surely it depends on the kind of work you do? My job involves lots of talking to other people so open plan and chatting face to face is a good design.

I actually think they can work very well. You can interact with your colleagues more easily and it can make for a friendlier environment. And if you need peace and quiet, just put some headphones on, and people get the message.

Much depends on the organisation of the space and the ground rules.

It depends how it's done. There are certain non negotiables that often don't happen.

Enough desks that people can find one easily with their wider colleague group. Enough well equipped meeting rooms for group work. You are saving a ton of money by not paying for a desk per person. Stop skimping!

Decent storage for personal effects. It must be near your assigned desk area.

No weird nonsense about sitting in a new desk each day and talking to people who have nothing to do with you.

Proper attention paid to a decent ergonomic setup.

Some of us actually want to be with other people sometimes. If I WFH all day every day, I fall into bad habits like not getting up till five minutes before I'm due to log on, not getting washed and dressed, and eventually that manifests in a bad way.

But sure, having flexible offices is a bad thing.

I used to have my own office shared with 2 other people and we moved to hot desking 18 months ago. I like it. I now say hello to lots more colleagues (I wasn't especially keen on the 2 I used to share with) and it makes much more sense now that everyone wfh part of the week. It was silly to have offices sitting empty.

So used to it now, zero point having a desk each when most don’t come in much.

Agree on the hot desking but I find open plan offices so much more convenient, I often need to interact with my team and it’s so much easier being able to turn round and speak to them than troll round to various offices or cubicles. The only person in my current and previous company who has an office is the CEO.

Hot-desking is awful, having on say one or two days a week an open plan office, set groups of desks and wfh the remainder can work and does for me. I don't have colleagues with verbal diarrhoea or other unpleasant habits. Or those on calls discussing personal matters and/or being the big I am.

I hated the idea of going open plan. I loved my little office but we moved buildings. In all honesty, the guy who sat opposite me got me through a lot of bad times. I would hate hot decking but DD says there are never many people in on the same day anyway.

Landlords don’t fit out an office, unless you work in a serviced office. Your employer decided to cram in hot desks 😆

to be fair, as far as I can see the only difference is not having your own dedicated desk. The “call centre” set up has been common my whole working life (nearly 30 years)

I wfh but I go to the office one day a week. Some people don’t understand hot desking and they leave their shit all over the desks and then moan when someone else sits there. I go in just for a change of scenery but I get far more work done wfh.

I think open wall and hot desking are examples of new phenomena that have disabled people who wouldn't have previously recognised themselves as Neurodiverse. No consistent place to sit, loud noise, using keyboards and mouses that smell of other people's lunch fingers, these are all things that can spin out an ND person and make them feel like they're are not cut out for working life, when in fact they are just not cut out for open wall hot desking. So they now pursue a diagnosis and ask for reasonable adjustments not because they are disabled by life, but because they have been disables by being plonked into a designed environment that scrambles their brains.

Hate hot decking. So many annoyances:

• coming in to find someone in the desk you booked
• chair/workstation not always adjustable so that you're comfortable (so many chairs seems jammed on the highest setting so my feet don't touch the ground!)
• IT equipment missing/not working and no-one has reported it
• having to carry all your stuff to the office as no storage
• no facilties like tea, coffee or milk because it just gets nicked/you have to bring it in with you every time
• too much background noise for teams calls
• feeling like you cant chat to colleagues because someone next to you is on constant teams calls
• inadequate breakout spaces or quiet rooms for teams calls or private conversations

-constant passive aggressive notes/emails about all the above

When we had our own offices and desks these things weren't a problem!

We have something in the middle - we have smaller offices with 4 desks, and between 4-6 people assigned per office, then a couple of unassigned offices for overspill. Between people’s different office/WFH patterns throughout the week coupled with a few people on holiday at any one time it seems to work well. The majority of us really like the small shared office set up.

We have open plan and hot desking. It works really well. You can book a room or a ‘pod’ if you want quiet time. Human nature means that we all tend to sit at the same desks when we go in. So I don’t have a designated desk, but I actually do, as on the one or 2 days I might go in - it’s the one I always use.

I’d say only about 20% of our office space is ever in use. Dozens of unused desks every day. Such a waste of money to have heating, lighting, building services, cleaners etc. I don’t know why they keep the office going, tbh.

Thank you for raising this, very valid points. No one should have to declare a disability if they choose not to.

I hate the version of open plan we have at my current office. I have an office right next to it & have to listen to the noise - singing, laughing, gossip.

Although we don't hot desk, I can guarantee someone will use my desk while I'm away next week & change all my ergonomic settings & eat my snacks. It won't be long before I'm shafted to the hot desk area in favour of a full timer anyway. It'll be unbearable as they're so noisy. I can't make client calls as it is, until they go on lunch.

My last job I turned down an office because our open plan worked so well as a team.

We all hot desk but only go in max twice a week

the obvious advantage for our employer is they get by renting half the space because letting out a space for a desk for each person would be wasteful and largely pointless

we all have our preferred spots and by and large that is respected

I hated it. Absolute filthy way to have to work.

But this isn’t a hot desking problem its a poor office management problem.

Our offices have large fully adjustable desks and chairs, each desk has a docking station attached to a couple of screens, keyboard and mouse. Extra kit can be booked with the desk. Desks are to be left clear each night - random crap will be disposed off or kept in lost property. There are break out areas for small groups to work together aside from meeting rooms/private offices (which can also be booked).

Decent coffee (bean to cup), teas, milks, mugs etc are provided in each of the well maintained kitchen areas and replenished regularly by FM staff. Problems with a desk are addressed by the FM team - most things resolved within an hour or two and if they can’t resolve it quickly they find you a cancelled desk as a priority.

Different practices tend to congregate around particular areas - something covered within the booking system. The only problem is enough desks on peak days - staff plainly don’t find it unpleasant to work in the environment.

Just as with small offices - poor office management will always be a problem, good office management can enable any model.

What is the option to open plan? Everybody has their own designated office or cubicle? You may as well stay at home and work if you're not going to see anyone in the office, unless you book a meeting room or wander around talking to people over their cubicle panel.

easily solved one place i worked: the cleaner had a big, clean, plastic box and just swept everything from the desks into that box and people had to claim it back.

Security meant that papers left out would be a huge issue so that wasn'T often the case. But when management got sick of people leaving half-full mugs of coffee on those "clean at EOB" desks, the cleaner was told "just sweep it all in, whatever it is" and it stopped immediately. There was already a clear policy that mugs were to be placed in the dishwasher by whoever had use them so this was killing two birds with one stone.