Find a desk, plug in, and get to work. Hot-desking seems to provide unprecedented convenience and flexibility under the background of boosting hybrid work model and increasing number of freelance workers and contractors. But hot desk is more of a double-edged sword in the workspace. It might work in your business’s favour, but sometime it works against the staff, especially the full-time employees who are likely to prefer the regularity of a personal workstation.
Followings are grado’s thinking about the pros and cons of hot-desking:
PROS:
Businesses save property cost through hot-desking.
In this post-pandemic world, with full-time staff positions dwindling, contract and freelance work, which has already been picking up steam, are re-accelerated. Hot-desking flows from the fact that assigning them a permanent desk is not practical. The same may be true for those who work from home two or three days a week or are constantly on the road, visiting clients. Based on which, hot-desking saves cost for employers by reducing office space.
Professional hot-desk agreements include all-inclusive amenities.
An amenity-rich hot-desk agreement offer more sorts of common areas and office management service. It gives the working staff access to bathroom with its necessities, kitchen with free-flowing coffee, meditation room with comfy lounges and cushions and other needed services.
(grado’s meditation room solution)
Hot-desking offices are required to provide more private space.
Conversations including meeting schedule, strategic planning, and financial discussion, are too sensitive for a hot-desking workspace, especially when people around your are from other teams or companies. Private space like sound-proofed private phone booths and bookable meeting rooms are definitely prepared.
(grado’s FlexSpace Office Pod)
CONS:
It takes time to find a seat on every weekday.
One might take around 15 minutes to find a seat and arrange all the stuff from his/her bag. But when it is translated into a year, the wasted time would be horrible. In addition, to get one’s ‘dream seat’, one has to get to the office much earlier than usual time, than others. Which, to some degree, adds an extra workload to the staff. And this environment would be hard to motivate staff to get into an atmosphere of professionalism.
Hot desk erases one’s trace of personality.
One has to take all his/her belongings sustaining work to the desk and pack them all when leaving. With a hot desk being imposed on every employees, no matter full-time or freelance, the staff are impossible to find any certainty of a regular work station. As a consequence, it would be absolutely hard to build up inclusion and a sense of belonging in the team.
Extremely clean and tidy environment might hurt creativity.
The staff are going to always take their belongings or store them in the lockers when leaving. But the magazines, books, or any other paper materials piling on a regular office table might echo a novel idea and help make some progress.
Co-workers might have conflicts for one hot desk.
Potential conflicts would always exist with the hot-desking on grabbing the best table. Which make the start of a working day sort of stressful. What’s worse, in some hot-desk office, latent rule naturally and tacitly goes that some seats will be reserved for those with seniority.
grado is ready to offer thoughtful service meeting one’s all-round needs in the workspace. We promise to put forward sincere comprehensive advice on your workspace, triggering critical thinking and rational talk.
