Hot-Desking — No, It’s Not Hot Sex on a Desk
I just got back from cleaning out my cubicle at my office, an event I was both yearning for and dreading for several weeks. I admit that I have been dying to go back to the office to see my colleagues and be in my old workplace. I have been working from home for over fourteen months now since March 12th, 2020 — the day that will live in infamy as the 21st century’s D Day. The day the pandemic became real. The day our world changed.
But my fantasy of going back to the office has been about going back to normal, a normal that is no longer there to go back to. Remote work is here to stay, and companies are taking advantage of the positives: a greater pool of talent that is not constrained by location, saving on commuting time and cost, flexible hours and therefore more productivity. But the biggest positive is that companies no longer need to spend the same amount of money on an office space. When you have less people working in the office it follows that you would need less space to house them.
I get it — I wouldn’t want to pay exorbitant lease fees either if I didn’t have to. But — and there is a big but coming . . . . what will my hybrid work life look like when I go back two or three days a week this fall?
Well, I know won’t have my own desk space anymore. That’s what “hot-desking” and “hoteling” is all about. Hoteling is a bit more civilized in that you sign up for workspace online like you would with a We Work membership. That seems workable in theory, especially if you have a regular schedule of days in and days out. Hot-desking is much more freewheeling. You just show up and see if you can get a space. According to Wikipedia, the term “hot desking” is derived from the naval practice of hot racking, where sailors on different shifts share the same bunks, which is the opposite of what we want in a post-pandemic world (Ewww . . . germs. Gross!)
Given the precautions that companies are taking with spacing employees at least six feet from each other, this may be playing a game of Russian Roulette. You could get to the office and not find a space to sit, and then you may have to be creative. Sit on a bookshelf, or perhaps perch on a coffee table? It doesn’t sound very productive. With all the trouble, why not just stay home and continue to work from your kitchen table?
And companies like dotcoms who in “the before times” prided themselves on being completely open-planned, where everyone could sit at tables, on the floor, on comfy beanbag chairs, or work in lofts that looked a lot like children’s jungle-gyms (Google). What about them? Will they have to completely reconfigure their offices so that seats with desks and computer docks are encased in plastic or glass like the bubble restaurants that cropped up all over NYC this winter? Or like yurts or tents? Will we be glamping inside our office? The endless possibilities give me a headache.
But what it really makes me think is that having offices with actual doors like in the olden days of the ought’s and before then seems incredibly rational right now. Not only is it safer germ-wise, but employees feel a sense of their own personal space and have privacy. They can have quiet time to think, to come up with great ideas, to read essays and even edit them. One can cry in an office with a door. You can call the Gynecologist and describe a particularly bad yeast infection without worrying that anyone can hear about it. You can eat spicy food for lunch and not offend anyone around you. In an office with a door — a room of one’s own — one could even have sex on a desk.
