Everyone has an opinion on the flexible workplace trend taking place these days. Go look and you’ll be inundated fairly quickly. Most of the articles are negative from people who are personally impacted but have no experience in corporate real estate or business productivity generally.
Hot-desking, flex working, hoteling, agile, desk booking, coworking are all words describing the same concept: having fewer desks than employees assigned to the office. There are no two ways about it, people take “their” seat in the workplace seriously. If they feel you are taking it away, without solid reasons and getting something in return, they will react strongly and negatively.
As a thought experiment, a 100 person site in the US will cost approximately $1m per year in total real estate and facility costs. Similarly, most US employee populations work outside the office 40 to 60% of the time. This means, almost every day of the week, that 100 person site is sitting half empty. This means that there is $500k of sunk cost (year over year) that could be going toward profits, reinvestment, growth or some other area of the business.
Agile working is not about just saving money, it’s about using a company’s assets most effectively toward business goals. Sometimes that will mean needing 1 seat per person in a business or market. Sometimes that may mean getting rid of an office (but not the employees) entirely. The answer will usually fall somewhere in the middle.
Where things go wrong is when businesses go down this route without focusing on the colleague experience. Taking away seats and space without providing employees with a plan and including them in the process is a design for failure. Communication is a fundamental requirement for making any given solution successful.