Hot Desking Ain't So Hot

“HotDesking” or “hoteling,” where workers don’t have assigned desks, but just find an available table to work at — one of the stupidest trends I’ve ever seen.

At the company where I work now, they’re transitioning to this. Tearing out the beatiful L-shaped cubicles where everyone has ample desk space, storage, sound-proofing and privacy. Replacing them with tables where no one has any of those things.

And when you walk onto one of these faddish new floors, the first thing you see is an acre of clutter — the work surfaces jammed with monitors and laptops that don’t have quite enough room, and beneath the tables a chaos of dangling cables, spare shoes, backpacks, umbrellas and whatnot.

And the people working at these “desks?” If they have a large external monitor, their laptop screen cuts off the lower half of the view. If they have two external monitors, they spend the whole day twisting their neck left or right. Without an L-shape to their desk, and with tables that aren’t very deeps, there’s no easy way to put one of the large monitors straight in front of you.

People typing with their elbows way back, because the table is too narrow for both a laptop and the external monitors. People working in a cramped, neck-torquing way, their feet constantly kicking against their supplies, women in dresses having to cross their legs just so, everyone trying to tune out everyone else’s phone calls and chatter...

It looks like an emergency setup, a tech crew flown in overnight to manage a FEMA operation. But this is day-in and day-out, for years. Until it’s replaced by some better (or worse) idea of how to design an office that gets maximum publicity as really cool and hip.

Dumb, dumb, dumb.