Hotdesks - How does your work?

[Faultymain5]

Hi

We have a dilemma at work where our team of is being allotted to sit in a zone with other teams. Leaving not enough seats for everyone on 3-4 days of the week. However, there is no reservation system in place and it's on a first come first served basis. The thing with a first come.... basis is that some people come in later as they drop children off at school first and so they will never be sitting with the team. One of them is the head of the team. The team is quite collaborative in a discussing things ad hoc, but if you can't find you're team members, it's a little hard to do that, and seems an inefficient use of time a) finding a seat and b) finding your colleague when you need them.

It is what it is, but I'm wondering how other companies deal with the hot desking system. They don't want to allow any kind of reservation system, nor anchoring anyone particular.

I work from home, our main office gives a load of desks for hotdesking.

What happens in reality is that you wander in after the main meeting you are there for, see there are no desks available, sit on someone else's chair to speak to the person you need to speak to, they come back and you are offed out, and end up just going home.

In one of my previous jobs it was first come first served, which was no good if you needed to drop kids off first or had a longer commute in.

I said again and again that we needed a desk booking system but was ignored. I was a home worker, so the whole point of being in the office was to be with my colleagues but that point seemed to be lost on them.

Eventually my boss said I needed to be in the office more often, I said that the lack of booking put me off, and she just said tough you need to get in earlier. At that point I started looking elsewhere for a job and left a few months later (also for other reasons, not just because of hot desking).

I'm overly concerned about the fact the company is not issuing keyboards and expecting people without keyboards to use their laptops. All day everyday. Doesn't seem ergonomically sound.

If your employer is lax in their duty of care, then raise a collective grievance because almost everyone nowadays uses a computer and you need to protect yourselves against risk of carpel tunnel syndrome and other conditions brought about by not fully supporting your wrists and arms from RSI.

We have started this recently. I loathe it. We can book, at least, but if I have any time off I have to spend half an hour adjusting my screens and chair, cleaning the aftershave off my phone etc, it's such a waste of time. Plus I'm supposed to have flexible hours - but you can only book mornings or afternoons, not any time. Sometimes someone sits in my desk even when it's booked because we're just so short on space - then there's the uncomfortable "are you in the wrong seat" conversation with a stranger you feel annoyed with even though you've never met them before! It's caused a lot of arguments between people who would previously never have crossed paths, and that's in a fairly easy-going workplace.

We’ve hit desired at work for 20 years. We have also had touch down spaces for people that drop by and need connectivity for an hour or two.

We have also had home working for 20 years. Hit decking with reduced decking for the total head count only really works with a. Agile workforce and home working.

*hot decking not hitdesired for hit decking!

Ffs *HOT DESKING

*We’ve hit desired at work for 20 years. We have also had touch down spaces for people that drop by and need connectivity for an hour or two.

We have also had home working for 20 years. Hit decking with reduced decking for the total head count only really works with a. Agile workforce and home working.*

This has perked my morning right up. I totally agree, the whole point to be agile, if you aren't encouraging that, then it won't work. Whilst I don't think people should be forced out of their jobs, I do also think that when change happens, if it isn't the change for you then reassessing and moving on is perhaps a good thing. We are in the process of moving office and a couple of the locations that have been suggested have caused some issues for some people. One location will involve me moving from a bus pass to a travelcard so incur more expense. I have to weigh up the pros and cons of working here and decide if it is for me.

@MercedesDeMonteChristo Might be worth checking the HR manual. When we were looking at moving offices, the HR manual said that we had to pay any excess travel incurred by employees over a period of time.

Yes, over 45 mins. We've checked. We are in Central London and staying so it is highly unlikely to increase to that amount of time, but I just might not fancy Marble Arch or whatever.

That's a pity. Our manual was based on any additional cost, no matter how far.

The team is quite collaborative in a discussing things ad hoc, but if you can't find you're team members, it's a little hard to do that

We have break out meeting booths.
Problem is the WiFi is crap so bringing your lappy to a booth rarely works well.
We had a skype meeting the other day... refused to work over the WiFi so we had to go back to our desks & use wire connections & annoy everyone in our office our chat plus the background noise levels were very high (usually are). Key colleague at WiFi only office couldn't get in at all.

We have small lockers to put stuff in every night, at least. I would give up without that.

I can't work from home. I might manage 2 hrs actual work done over a 10 hr period. It's just too distracting here to get hardly anything done.

Having to clear your desk due to a 2 hr absence sounds hard core(!)
True hot-desking is extremely inefficient, imho.

If you go off to a meeting where I work and are not back wihin the hour, if it's busy and someone needs a desk they can remove your belongings (carefully, not just slung in a heap on the floor) and use the desk.

Most of the time that doesn't happen but occasional I've fallen foul of the rule and come back to no desk. I'm in the fortunate position of living a 30 min easy drive away so if I don't have meetings in the afternoon, I can come in, do the necessaries and wfh in the afternoon. Works nicely as I miss the rush hour.

I think why it mostly works with us is because they analysed desk use before deciding on the mix of hot desks and permanent desks, so those who are in the office all the time get a permanent desk, like HR, but I don't think anyone in Sales has their own desk, nor does anyone whose main working location is listed as "home." (Your main working location also governs where you can claim travel expenses.) They also track how many come into the office on which days (we're never going to have a practice fire evacuation on a Friday, because we usually don't have the minimum number required to make it count as we do on other days. Tuesday is usually the busiest day.)

I think that is key to making it work, analysing how different teams work. Working from home doesn't work for everyone all the time and never does in some roles. If an office regularly has too few desks for the number of people who come in, they've got the hot desking design wrong.

Trouble is @EBearHug, any capacity analysis they do at the start of a Hot desking initiative can quickly fall out of currency if the team levels expand.

My department has doubled in the past 18 months so what used to be an elegant sufficiency of desks to begin with, now feels like we're all being shoe-horned in. Some of the subteams have decamped to another building to try and rebalance the load, a bit like servers

Their 2 year resourcing forecasts were absolute crap!

People with a certain level of seniority in our team have fixed desks and officially the rest of us move around them and sit where we can in the block of desks allocated to our team. In practice the senior people are more likely to set up elsewhere as they want to make sure the newer people are sitting with the team. However our work involves a lot of site visits, and that combined with flexitime and home working means we're rarely all in at once.

I do think it would be very difficult if we were all in the office all day every day, because as some other posters have said we have a lot of really useful ad hoc conversations across the team that you don't know you're going to have until you're having them.

If I had archive boxes full of paper contracts I was working on I would be very tempted to passive aggressively leave them on/under my desk for the duration. Really I think you should be allocated a fixed desk next to somewhere you can store them - hot desking goes with paperless working so if your job involves a lot of paper you need different arrangements!