Are hotdesks always hellish?
ALSO: UK government OKs trials of the 4-day week
If you want to create a successful workplace, you need to rethink the requirements of your employees, so says Leesman, an organisation that specialises in making workplaces better, in their latest research published this week.
Most organisations are somewhere along the journey of reducing their office footprint - and with that comes the decision of whether to switch to hotdesks. Leesman wanted to understand what workers preferred - and what led to that sentiment.
Leesman’s key findings:
Very few organisations are using their offices for more than three days a week
As a results two-thirds of organisations are planning to reduce their office footprint in the next 18 months
Workers can be happy with hot desks but the most important consideration is the variety of spaces for them to work in
A successful hotdesk workplace needs to take full account of the needs of those who struggle without an assigned seat
More details below and you can download the full Leesman report here
It’s worth reminding you that Leesman are the experts in this, having surveyed over 1.3m office users in their search to understand what excellence looks like. Their latest wave of data looked at 1591 workplaces, scoring each with a Leesman Index score (styled as Lmi). Any score over 70 is regarded as strong. In their latest wave organisations which had assigned seating were on average happier places - scoring an Lmi of 69.6, compared to an average of 68.2 for hotdesk environments. But hotdesk workplaces could be happier than assigned desk workplaces - the key factor was the provision of a ‘good variety’ of places to get work done. The Lmi for hotdesk workplaces with variety was 72.8.
Let’s go through the findings. Firstly Leesman observed how organisations are using their space. It won’t come as a surprise that very few companies are getting beyond 3 days a week usage of their space:
With that under-usage it’s no surprise that firms are reflecting on what their needs are. Two-thirds of organisations are planning to reduce their office footprint in the next 18 months, with a quarter saying the reduction will be considerable.
With smaller workspaces it poses the question whether firms make the leap to move from assigned seating to unassigned hotdesks. Leesman show that assigned seating is on a sharp decline since the Pandemic:
But they ask us to consider this decline in an historical context - this is a long-term trend, merely compounded by the era of hybrid working:
Yes, it can’t be argued that many of us have frustrations with hotdesks, struggling to find colleagues or being unable to personalise our workspace.
Assigned desks were seen as the best for spreading out work, reading, individual routine tasks, phone calls and general desk work. Interestingly unassigned workstations where there was a good variety of spaces was seen as better on a longer list of jobs: from informal social interactions, private conversations, creative thinking, mentoring, focused work, to collaborating with colleagues.
Overall those who had hotdesks but with a good variety of workspaces were 73% likely to agree ‘my workplace enables me to work productively’, outscoring assigned seating (72%) and hotdesks with poor variety (61%). That lead was extended when workers were asked if they were proud to bring visitors to. Unassigned with good variety scoring 72%, assigned desks scoring 57%, and hotdesks with poor variety clocking up just 48%.
Leesman added one caveat however, in any hotdesk environment there are different preferences. Even in offices that had hotdesks with a good variety of workspaces 58% of workers were described as ‘thrivers’, 17% were merely ‘accepters’ but 25% were still seen as ‘strugglers’. The strugglers were more likely to feel unproductive.
Leesman were clear that organisations need to make adaptations for all employees - that might mean having clear booking systems for private spaces, sufficient rooms for private calls and providing some degree of consistency to seating arrangements.
Download the full Leesman report
A few months ago I covered the fact that the outgoing Conservative government blocked an idea by Cambridgeshire council to experiment with 4-day working as a means of making their roles more attractive in the jobs’ market. This week Angela Rayner approved the proposal. This is really important from the perspective of the public sector. The roles were struggling to pay a competitive market rate to attract candidates - by using a 4-day configuration it could be a way to manage budgets while offering working terms that commercial organisations don’t choose to offer.
Another Bezos business goes all-in on RTO as Washington Post staff are summoned back to the office 5 days a week from 2025. Meanwhile Asda has insisted on a 3 day return for its team members
In contrast Pinterest are seeing their flexibility as a way to attract top talent in the job market leading to a 90% increase in applications
Tiffany Gaskell outlines coaching as a route to transformational leadership
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There's a key consideration about the modern manager given to us by the Gallup Global Workplace Report, 80% of those who are engaged with their jobs say they've received direct feedback from their manager in the last week. This is a powerful insight but also poses a huge challenge - how can any of us find the time to observe and then feedback to every worker in our team. Tiffany explains that this is where a culture of coaching comes in, transferring the burden of observation from the manager to facilitating a socratic questioning approach. In this week’s news financial company Synchrony claim their own coaching culture is one of the reasons for their recent success.
Tiffany Gaskell is the co-author of Coaching for Performance, the top-selling guide to coaching first published by Sir John Whitmore the inventor of the discipline.
It's curious to consider that there was a founder of coaching, and Tiffany takes me through the history of the practice, how it took hold and where it is today. How can any of us achieve transformation by using a coaching approach.
I think it depends. If you are a call center worker or administrative person who can truly do your job from anywhere, you can also use any random desk. But what is the point if you are equally productive?
On the contrary, knowledge workers with design materials, white boards and prototypes need a designated, and sometimes secure, space to store things. Coincidentally this type of work often benefits from occasional person collaboration.
While it may be tempting for companies to reduce costs and not provide assigned spaces, they are working counter to what provides the best working environment for employees. Forcing heads down folks to come into an office to sit at a random desk is the most suboptimal use of resources possible.
Interesting to consider this statistic about decreasing office space alongside recent headlines about increasing RTO mandates. It appears contradictory, but I suppose it could show a divide between companies