How do I convince my users that hotdesking is a good thing?
Hotdesking can save space and money, but your staff are the key to success, finds Nik Rawlinson
It’s easier than it sounds…
“Idon’t really like the term hotdesking,” said Andy Lake, editor of Flexibility, a flexible working and telework journal established with support from the European Commission. “If you’re looking to change the way an organisation works, encourage collaboration and mobility, the focus has to come away from the desk.”
Lake would rather we talk about finding the best place and time to do a piece of work than how the office itself should be organised. “Most large corporates and pretty much the whole public sector is on this road, one way or another,” he said. “So long as you’re not customer-facing, you can do your work from pretty much anywhere now, if you have the right tools.”
Identifying and deploying those tools is key to establishing a successful hotdesking workforce. Get it right, and you’ll not only have lower ongoing office costs, but productive, fulfilled staff, too.
The changing workplace
Offices should be designed to suit their users’ needs – which often evolve in sync with the tech to which they have access.
“The way people work now is fundamentally changed,” said Nathan Wheeler, Head of Fujitsu UK and Ireland’s Cloud Computing Product Business. “For millennials, their office is Starbucks, home, or working from the train. This shift in people’s work styles has caused a bigger challenge for the IT department, which will have to facilitate a choose your own device [CYOD] environment.”
As Fujitsu sees it, agile employees will choose the most appropriate tool for their job, based in part on where they perform it when they’re away from the desk. Upon returning to the corporate hub, workers will jump onto an available desk and connect the peripherals they need to work more comfortably within a static office environment. If that calls to mind the traditional laptop dock, though, think again.
“The biggest shift I’ve seen in the last few months is USB-C,” Wheeler said. “It’s supported by 95% of the new products we’ve launched, and from an IT administrator’s point of view, it’s fantastic. Even in a mixed environment, USB-C gives you the same experience for every user without multiple docking stations.”
Crucially, USB-C can also deliver power, so can be used to charge devices just as easily as it can to port data. Universal docks have been popular since the days of USB 2, but in truth they’re little more than port replicators, which still require users to bring their own charger, or IT to supply a range of charging solutions at each desk. With USB-C, that’s no longer the case. It can charge, connect to a printer, or even output to a display, so whether users are on a Fujitsu, Lenovo or Apple laptop, it really doesn’t matter: the IT department only needs to provide one standard set of external devices on each time-shared desk.
The physical effects of the cloud
Global office provider Regus, which leases facilities to big-hitters Spotify, Facebook, Google and Amazon, has seen a marked shift in workspace requirements over the past quarter of a century. And it’s all been driven by technological change. In particular, “the adoption at a mainstream level of technology that we all take for granted: cloud computing and mobile smart devices,” according to Richard Morris, Regus’ UK CEO. “We were providing space for people to use on an almost constant basis [25 years ago], but it’s very different today, where a lot of the space that we have is designed to suit different work styles, including co-working and shared space working.”
Cloud computing is perhaps the most important change, allowing staff to share digital resources regardless of the desk they land on – or whether
“Offices should be designed to suit their users’ needs – which often evolve in sync with the tech to which they have access”
they’re in the office at all. Allowing staff to hotdesk at a third-party’s premises, such as Regus, no longer means they lose access to the company’s in-house knowledge, as storing it in the cloud really does make it available anywhere, anytime.
This has driven a fundamental design change, too: offices are getting smaller and, slowly, organisations are weaning themselves off paper.
“Around 2011/12, a lot of organisations set a notional standard of 1.5 linear metres of storage per person, kept in a professional storage area,” explained Flexibility’s Andy Lake. “Now, it’s half a metre, or no storage at all: some organisations that used to be tremendously paperheavy now say that it’s only under exceptional circumstances that they will keep any paper on site. They have paperless meetings, and people are more productive.”
However, the move away from paper isn’t the only change that companies wanting to hotdesk need to consider. Lake reels off a list of factors that contribute to a successful agile workplace. “Rather than having an office organised into desks, meeting rooms and storage, you have a range of other spaces, fewer (and smaller) desks, people working from portable devices, breakout spaces where you can have an informal meeting while connecting to a screen for Skype or a WebEx call, and so on. There needs to be less focus on traditional ways of working, where people necessarily sit in teams.”
Overcoming objections
Such changes usually need management sign-off, yet it’s often the management strata that’s most reluctant to change. The drive towards hotdesking can fail through “senior leadership not quite getting it,” said Lake, “or managers who want to manage through presence, who expect their employees to be in front of them, rather than by managing through output. Once you make this switch, though, it matters far less where and when people are working.”
It stands to reason that employees who need to hotdesk once a week, rather than commuting daily, will consider signing on with a more distant employer, too.
“With a more flexible working model, a company can better attract and retain talent,” explained Regus’ Morris. “They open up the talent pool by being more flexible in relation to where they want employees to work [if] the priority is not having somebody close to the office but somebody who’s really good at the job. Technology means they can be anywhere.”
It’s a daunting prospect, but companies shouldn’t be afraid to fail in the first instance. Switching from a traditional setup to hotdesking requires that they cast aside traditions and conventions that in many cases have built up over two or three working lifetimes.
“Every organisation and person likes to think they’re special but there’s only a certain amount of types of work – the rest are generic,” Lake said. “[Management] needs to think with an innovation mindset, rather than with their old head on, and build up an idea of space layout from that.”
The number of stakeholders that need to be consulted is increasing, but rather than slowing the transition, it can help push it ahead. “Where we used to talk to the IT manager and
“Management needs to think with an innovation mindset, rather than with their old head on, and build an idea of layout from that”
finance manager, now there’s a third person involved in the decision-making process: the users,” said Fujitsu’s Wheeler. “They are more tech savvy and demanding.” Getting buy-in at this level, demonstrating to your users the freedom that hotdesking will give them, and getting them excited about the technology they’ll be using, could be enough to smooth the transition, and help them overcome the notions of desk ownership, and the belief that having a permanent place to work somehow denotes their status within the firm. Ultimately, though, you need to show them that this is a process delivered through the IT department, but very much driven by the user. “The digital employee has developed a new user profile,” said James Longworth, Solutions Architect Manager at Insight UK. “They’re living beyond their desks; accessing emails and documents on the go; using digital tools to manage workflow, productivity and decision making. In short, they’re streamlining their work lives with tech in the same way they’ve grown accustomed to doing in their personal lives as a consumer. “Any organisation that transitions to hotdesking is merely reflecting the ways that many users prefer to run their personal lives. Once they can be convinced of this, their objections can be quickly overcome.”