Hot-desking is a brilliant concept for every type of business, especially in winter. By installing heating elements within each desks, you can keep your employees’ hands warm, enabling them to type faster and therefore boosting their productivity.
https://www.condecosoftware.com/products/desk-booking/desk-booking-screens/
OK, I know that isn’t the definition of hot-desking, but I’m writing this at home, in the depths of winter and my boiler is broken, so I really wish it was… Anyway,
the real definition of hot-desking is bringing a concept of shared workstations into your office environment. Instead of each person having a desk of their own, people come and go through different workstations at different times.
For businesses who have long been wedded to the idea that a worker’s desk is his or her own personal space and territory, hot-desking can take a major change in philosophy and working practices. And because so many people are afraid of change, it’s something lots of enterprises shy away from.
But don’t be afraid! Embrace the change and see what a positive move hot-desking can be throughout your business for five key reasons:
1: It’s a more efficient use of office space
Every company has them: the employee that has their own workstation, even though they’re hardly ever there. They’re out in the field talking to suppliers three days a week, normally work from home for at least one of the other two, and seem to be on holiday half the time. (And why is it that they always have the plum spot in the corner next to the radiator?) They might not personally be a waste of space, but their workstation is just that.
Hot-desking means you can do away with these redundant spaces and repurpose them into a shared space that’s more practical for other workers and your business as a whole.
For example.
If you have 20 employees in a particular department but there are never more than 12 of them in the building at any one time, what do you need 20 desks for? Slim that down to 12 or 14 hot desks and use the spare space to accommodate new staff as your business grows without any extra real estate costs.
2: It’s a key enabler of flexible working
In the modern era where more and more workers want the ability to choose when and where they do their job, businesses have to change their working models to accommodate that flexibility. To be perfectly frank, shackling people to their desks nine-to-five just isn’t going to cut it much longer.
Hot-desking makes sure that agile workers who spend the majority of their time away from the office have a base at headquarters as and when they need it.
By ensuring every hot desk has the right infrastructure for them to plug in their devices, you can give them the best of home working and the best of office working at the same time. And in a labour market where younger workers increasingly value job satisfaction, that can be a major selling point in attracting talent.
3: It can foster a cleaner, tidier, happier workplace
When employees have their own workspace, it quickly becomes their territory. Personal effects and coffee mugs become commonplace, and if an employee always has their lunch at their desk, there could be food wrappers or dirty dishes, too. It might be OK for them, but a messy desk and smelly food is a sure-fire way to irritate the colleagues around them, not to mention how unprofessional it can look to visitors.
But with hot-desking, workers don’t have a territory to call their own. That’s because they have to share the environment with the people that used it before them and the people that will come after them. It generates a subtle psychological change in employees that they’re not working in a space that doesn’t feel like it belongs to them.
As a result, it can be much easier for you to enforce clear-desk or no-music policies that everyone adheres to for a workspace that suits everyone.
4: It encourages better collaboration
The best business ideas often come when people share their thoughts and work together to come up with winning solutions. But familiarity can breed contempt, and if the same groups of people keep sitting together, it can become harder and harder over time for new, creative concepts to shine through.
That all changes when you introduce the corporate Mad Hatter’s Tea Party that is hot-desking. Every day, different colleagues can find themselves next to each other, making it far easier for new exchanges of ideas to be expressed and cultivated. And if a particular combination doesn’t work out, then don’t worry: they’ll find themselves at completely different workstations the next time they come in.
5: It enables seamless office management when integrated with technology.
All of the above might sound like it’s a major task to orchestrate and perfect, but with the help of technology, it doesn’t have to be. By deploying a desk-booking system, employees can use their laptops or even mobile phones to book a desk for exactly the time they need it. And when integrated to your front-of-house team with a kiosk set-up, they can quickly check in when they arrive at your building and receive directions to the desk they’ve booked.
From your perspective, the management side of these systems allow you to take an overall view of desk bookings at any particular time, monitor occupancy rates and access in-depth data. That way, you can optimize your shared workspace and maximize the value your business gains from putting hot-desking measures in place.
But that’s enough about hot-desking for one day. I’m off to the Patent Office to register my fantastic new invention of a heated desk…