There are many reasons an organisation may introduce hot desking; to increase flexibility, to reduce costs, to introduce a different culture. It can be a difficult time for staff to move to this new way of working, but it is easier and less stressful to change your working habits to work with the new system enabling you to be open to the benefits offered by hot desking.
My organisation has been hot desking for five years and I enjoy the flexibility and sociality of it. Here are the tips I’ve learnt:
Before you start
- Understand the hot desking situation – are all desks free for you to use? Do you need to book a desk? By asking these and similar questions you can ensure you know exactly what to do when you walk into the office in the morning
- Learn how the telephone system works – do you still have a land line number? If so how is it transferred to a different desk each day? Can you transfer your land line calls to your mobile?
- Understand the IT situation – Does everyone have laptops? If so can they be connected to every desk, if not which desks allow laptops? Do you have roaming profiles? If not consider how to move your favourites and shortcuts; one solution may be to carry portable applications on a usb stick (if you are allowed to connect one) for instance using portable firefox as your browser
- Get organised – everything is easier if you are organised, including hot desking. It is likely you will need to clear the desk each night so it is not possible to leave ‘organised’ piles of papers or postit notes on the monitor, therefore it is important to introduce other methods for dealing with on going work, for instance a task list or tickler file.
- Take the opportunity to reduce files – it is likely that the volume of personal storage will reduce so it is a good opportunity to go through files and books and consider what it still useful to keep, if anything can be archived and what needs to be thrown away.
- Consider your reference material – you will no longer have an office or cubicle wall so any reference material needs to be stored differently. Look at what you currently have pinned on the wall and consider how often you use it, if it is often e.g. phone directory, add it to your organiser so you carry it with you, but if you only use a few times a month create a reference file kept in personal storage space or electronically.
- Learn what tools you use each day – it is easy to build up lots of items on your desk when you sit at it each day, however if you are hot desking you may need to carry all your items. It is good to carry only what you need, for your back, but also so it is quicker to pack up at the end of the day. So learn what you actually use on a daily basis, one method is to put a sticker on items each time you use them over a two week period. My essentials for a day are paper, pen, ruler and highlighter that I carry in my handbag with occasional uses of stapler and hole punch available on the desk.
- Ask what to do if you need ‘alone’ time – Sometimes it is important to be on your own, for instance if you are reviewing a large document, and it can be difficult in an open plan office. Find out the situation in advance; can you book a meeting room? Can you work from home?
- Learn to focus – some people are naturally more noisy than others whether that is talking on the phone, typing or eating and it can be distracting. In an open plan environment it is not possible to get away from noise completely, but investigate whether there are some areas that tend to be quieter than other. If not can you listen to a mp3 player or CD player? Or what about using earplugs?
- Learn to deal with interruptions – this can be a problem with open plan as there is no office door to close. However with hot desking there is one advantage of sitting somewhere different so you are more difficult to find (although this is only likely to work the first few times). Alternatively you can let your colleagues know you are happy to be interrupted between certain times or use a marker so people know not to interrupt you e.g. a red jumper on the back of your chair or a cuddly dog on the desk.
Things to do each day
- Clean the desk – ensure you are sitting at a clean and tidy desk each by wiping it down particularly when there is illness going round the office
- Ensure you change the desk setup – when you first sit down ensure the desk layout is the correct layout for you, including the chair height and monitor height. Do you need any special equipment to ensure healthy working? I have a lumbar cushion I can use on each chair in the office by putting the elastic around the chair back.
- Enjoy being social – by moving desk you will sit with different people so will therefore learn new things about them and their work. It is a good opportunity to develop new contacts and learn about possible areas for you to work in the future.
Please leave a comment if you have any other tips on hot desking as I am always looking for new ideas for my working practices
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I didn’t realize that what we were doing was called Hot Desking!
At our work place, we have so many people that we actually ran out of space so we started making communal work sites that no one “owns.” One of the interesting things that we have found was that it can really open up creativity because you get to open up with more people.
We were originally worried about losing productivity, but people are acutally good about policing themselves.
And it does work well with each person cleaning up after themselves.
We have someone who created a little tote and when they come to the station, actually set it up and personalize it just for the time they use the desk!
Mike,
I agree with you that one of the best thing about hot desking is sitting with different people. I learn a lot about different projects and different parts of the company by changing where I sit.
Unfortunately as a group we are not so good at cleaning after ourselves, so it is now part of my morning routine to wipe down the desk and it doesn’t really take that long.
Different people approach hot desking in widely differing ways, I’ve seen people who have just a mug and a pad of paper on their desks and others who have a box with their personal items that they set up in the morning. But however you go about it, it is nice to start the day without a pile of papers on the desk left from yesterday.
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We have all of these in place, and it still drives me mad. I just don’t think I’m a hot desker. It took 3 desk attempts this morning to get a desk that had the right configuration and monitor connection for my laptop. 20 minutes to set up is insane. I’m going to speak to my manager to see about getting a static desk, because 10-20 minutes each day is lost work for the business even if that’s only 1 person. And my logging into different phones seems to be causing my logon problems.
I also rarely get ill (although do get a few colds), but now I’m hotdesking it’s bound to be more prevalent. Urgh, means I’ll have to start cleaning my desk, keyboard, mouse and phone every morning – when I used to laugh at everyone else who did it.
Nope, not for me
When we started hot dealing we didn’t have laptops, we just moved from desktop to desktop which didn’t require any setup in the morning, but meant you could easily lose files if you saved them to the computer and then sat somewhere else. Now we have docking stations so it is easy to get the wires connected, although we have two makes of laptops so you have to get a desk with the correct dock. We don’t have phones anymore as it is all done through the computer with a headset.
Good luck, I hope you settle into it.
[…] where I could hire a desk – hot desking (if you are considering this do check out these 13 top tips to hot desking) for short periods of time which I think would really help with productivity. Sometimes you just […]
Finally, we have moved over to hot desking!
We were trying to mix things up for a while by moving the team around every 4 months which worked in terms of mixing the team up and stop people from nesting, but it was a hassle because there is 20 of us & people wanted their own ‘stuff’ on their PC’s (I work for and IT company so everyone was VERY particular about how their computers were set up) and the office always seemed to be a mess with spare cables etc. after we moved about. We soon grew to a point of needing to move to a bigger premises, but realising that desks were only in use for about 60% of the time it made more sense to try and get the team to hot desk. What a daunting task… but we did it!
The first thing we had to do was overcome the technical problems which I can see all of you have also faced. But working in IT gave us a HUGE advantage here. A couple of the guys got together and have created possibly the geekiest thing I have ever seen and solved the hot desking technical issues… here is how they did it http://www.lucidica.com/blog/random-technology/the-worlds-best-hot-desking-environment/
Yes they were so excited about they wrote a blog!
I’m very proud to say – I agree and think we have one of the best hot desking environments in the world. It also allowed us more space than we knew what do do with….. so we did this. http://www.lucidica.com/blog/how-to-guides/making-hot-desking-a-hit/
We did loads of research before getting to this point and everyone seemed to have the same technical issues. Hopefully our geeky guide will help some of you out.
Yay for hot desking
Katy,
Thank you for sharing how you introduced hot desking, I’m sure people will enjoy reading how it worked in practice. I love that the space saved on desks was used to create a fun area; when my previous company introduced it they kept the same number of desks but got more staff using the area.