Marking your territory

Peeing around your desk

I SOMETIMES LIKE to pretend I am David Attenborough, occasionally going so far as to crouch next to the cat to say something along the lines of, “And here you see the male of the species marking his territory by peeing on my bed”. It makes me very popular at parties and for that reason alone I see no reason to cease my behaviour.

Marking one’s territory sprang to mind again recently when we were told at work that as well as moving buildings we were moving to hot desking. I’ll admit I panicked. My desk and I are close. I don’t want to share it. I know what will happen, it’ll start seeing other people, catch diseases and pass them on to me. It’s happened before.

Despite those of us averse to sharing (the AOL Jobs site recently described hot desking as one of the “Five workplace trends making your job harder”), the enthusiasm for hot desking isn’t waning.

And apparently this isn’t just about companies trying to save space and make more cash. Of course not. Even back in 2002, when the (admittedly ultra- conservative) Telegraph newspaper in Britain wrote about the initiative, it was noted that for employees hot desking was a win because they were judged on results, not on how long they were at their desks each day.

Backing this is up an article by the British Psychological Society published a few years ago on ‘self-management’, suggesting employees who work without constant supervision do a better job, work harder and achieve more.

Those who think they should be selfmanaging but know they’re being watched (by the boss at the next desk, for example) will try to recover autonomy by other means, even at the expense of the organisation. So micromanaging is even more uncool than we realised.

But mostly it’s all about efficiency. In 2013, real estate firm CBRE found that on average 30% of US offices are vacant. Hot desking can fix this shocking waste of space by allowing companies to downsize their actual office and take away permanent desks for employees who don’t work on-site every day.

Deloitte’s new headquarters in Toronto, which opens this year, will have no permanently assigned desks. A 2014 Financial Post article notes that “The cost of moving into fancy new digs is being offset by savings from better space utilisation, packing employees in tighter than ever before.”

Of course, this can also create a vicious musical chairs scenario where fear of missing out means you bagsy a desk anyway, or just rely on your status to do the work for you.

An anecdote in a 2013 Business Insider Australia article on hot desking describes the etiquette around people knowing they should never try to work at a desk that an important person has metaphorically peed around.

“You know that you can’t sit at some of the window seats … probably, their executive assistant would come up and ask you to move.”

Downsizing on space and upping profits is all very cheering for the higher ups, but for me, it’s the little things that appeal about hot desking. Such as the fact that your boss won’t always be able to physically locate you. They’ll be able to see you’re around online but, really, you can be far from the madding crowd just by sitting somewhere else. On a different floor. Maybe wearing a wig.

Penelope Whitson is a word nerd with a fondness for syntax, cats and lolling about scoffing cake. She tweets on an irregular basis at @PenelopeWhitson

A 2013 Business Insider Australia article on hot desking describes how you should never try to work at a desk that an important person has metaphorically peed around.”