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Comment by KaiserPro | Hacker News Reader

Hotdesking can be so utterly impersonal it makes a mockery of RTO.

The point of RTO is that you are surrounded by colleagues in your team so that you can spontaneously collaborate. It sounds like its just a meat market and everyone is jammed together regardless of team or affiliation.

hotdesking only really works for a small number of situations, and even then, it needs careful planning and thought.

You need permanent lockers so that you have somewhere to stash your shit.

the equipment needs to be all the same class(to avoid "I want this one") and _higher_ quality than non-hotdesk.

Repairs need to be proactive.

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Hot-desking is awful. I was going to say it's the worst of both worlds, but it's actually even worse than that. You're not around your teammates, you can't "move in" to your desk, and you have to commute. Honestly, what is the point? Either give me my own desk or let me WFH.

The company I work does hot-desking, but it is implicitly also divided into groupings. All the people in each team sit in the same part of the office each day and hotdesk within that group of desks. There are maybe 1 time in 50 that I show up and there are no desks free in my teams part of the office.

One other potential advantage with hot-desking is that you can have different zones with different rules. Working on a project where you need to talk with your colleague a lot during the day, sit in the 'talking' zone. Need to be left alone in silence for 8 hours straight, move to the 'quite' zone.

My company uses a very simple system. Each team gets assigned an area that only they can book. For example a team of 15 people get a cluster of 10 desks. That solves it.

My company uses an even simpler system. Each team of 15 people gets assigned 15 desks.

But that's less efficient than 10 desks for 15 people!

But that in turn is less efficient than 0 desks for 15 people.

Thinking about it, why stop there? Negative desking is the future. A team of 15 could have -15 desks (or less, if they are high performers). Super efficient.

I’m envisioning carnival barkers trying to get other teams to use up their -15 seats as if they don’t sell out they have to pay the company a rental fee.

I hope that no CEO reads your comment otherwise all the guys that have mandatory RTO are screwed XD

The most common implementation for negative desking is having everyone working from home

That's just zerodesking. For negative desking the team has to turn their hotdesking area into a wework.

Is it?

Of course, neither of us nor the company really has hard knowledge of what is "more efficient", because despite being entirely driven by profit metrics and A/B testing there is still no real way to measure productivity for knowledge workers. And even if there was, employee misery wouldn't be part of the metric unless it measurably affected retention.

Works if people aren’t coming in every day. We have set days where certain teams come in. You’ll be sitting next to the people you work with and the company doesn’t need as many desks

but they cram them in like factory chickens

What does it solve though? If the purpose of RTO is being together with your team, and you don't have enough desks to bring the team in the office at the same time, this solves basically nothing.

Hybrid working. Everyone has certain days that they work from home.

A company I know forced all employees to attend a seminar about ergonomics at work. It included a visit from the presenter who would come to everyone's desk and adjust everything (chair height, reclining resistance, screen angle, light, etc). This company is now migrating everyone to hotdesking.

What I'd love to ask the CEO: was it all a circus back then, or do you not care about your employees' health now?

CEO response: It is your personal responsibility to adjust your seating and workspace arrangements to your personal needs. Please do take the time (i.e. come in early) to make sure your work environment is suitably ergonomic.

No mention of how this was sold at the time or how much time is invested in fixing everything every morning, or how that will work for employees with disabilities that make it difficult/impossible to adjust their workspace by themselves.

(Somewhat ITish company in Germany, 250 employees) - I had to fight hard to get the company to buy seven 4K monitors (total of 2800€) and now those seats are always booked lol. At least my colleagues are a bit more productive I guess... the other desks have 1080p monitors and look terrible when connected with a Mac.

What kind of company is that? The cost of a 4k display (and 400 Euro is pretty much bottom of the barrel when it comes to good displays) is a fraction of the yearly salary of an employee, lasts many years, and a good screen can help reducing eyesight problems. It always surprises me that companies apply austerity to weird things, like providing a setup that keeps employees healthy, while probably throwing a lot of money at irrelevant stuff.

You'd be surprised how accounting works at some companies. I've seen companies buying 10k euro civil engineering software to run on 1k euro computers that could barely handle it, and refusing to also pay to upgrade the computers.

Well you know, Germans are ruthless optimizers. They just tend to optimize for the wrong objective functions, and the wrong constraints. Also the wrong time frames.

Hotdesking for knowledge workers is basically so bad it's punitive. The same kind of disregard for your physical and mental comfort as Amazon warehouse workers, just with a higher salary attached.

I think you’re mistaken about the meaning of RTO - it is purely there to satisfy out of touch and overpaid management.

In meta's case its: "lots of people left who joined remote, perhaps its because everything is tribal knowledge based? lets evolve the culture to make it more frien.... YOLO RTO PEOPLE"

I also want my own clean chair. I notice people have no problems putting their feet on empty ones ... well, I don't want to sit in those.

They created hotdesking so we miss the already-awful permanent seat shared open spaces and beg for their return.

You only get back your permanent seat in shared office of you work at the office every day, without any wfh-privileges.

Sincerely, the management.

Were I used to work they did all the things you suggested and it worked well. Every desk had a good setup, nice chair, massive screen etc. There were plenty of lockers and other storage if you needed to leave things in the office.

Some of us had laid claim to a desk if we were always in, but most people tended to be in only a few days a month. Different teams tended to cluster in particular parts of the office when they were in. There were plenty of desks so there were no arguments.

Hotdesking, hybrid working, remote working and fixed desk in-office setups can all work, but they require people to actually think about how space and systems are designed, and to put enough resources in place.

Unfortunately, most companies just don't put the thought in to the details, or the resources in to make them work properly, so they become terrible work environments and then they complain that no one wants to come to the office.

I have very little sympathy for companies that can't make hybrid work because they just put the minimum effort in, and then complain that it's all the employees fault.

A previous company managed to do hotdesking very well. The key was they started small and rolled it out as they learnt. By the time they moved building and went full hotdesking, they'd ironed out the problems and made it workable.

This. Pretty much all of this

And a good booking system to assign people to desks "in their regions"

But I guess the managers that "are worried about collaboration" didn't think of that

The only point of RTO is to make the C-suite and managers happy to be back in control, since the only thing that gets them going is the thought of their underlings being miserable.

These sociopaths don't care if it's awful for everyone involved as long as they get to see their minions at their desks, knowing that they're the reason dozens/hundreds of people are having their lives wasted on thumb twirling in some depressing office.

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