When employees returned to offices after COVID, many found their desks had been replaced by lockers. Each morning meant competing for whatever seat was free, carrying laptops from floor to floor, setting up from scratch. Hot-desking was presented as modern and collaborative. It was neither.
Hot-desking was sold as liberation from hierarchy, fixed thinking, and the assigned desk. Strip away that framing and the agenda was straightforward: squeezing more bodies into less space while calling it progress. Austerity dressed as innovation.
The damage was measurable. Hot-desking reduced face-to-face interaction, increased dependence on messaging platforms, and shattered sustained attention. Noise and instability pushed employees to perform busyness rather than do their best work. Focus pods and quiet zones attempted to soften the model, but patches can’t fix a broken system. The people most harmed were those organizations depend on most: the analysts, strategists, and researchers whose roles require uninterrupted thought.
What hot-desking got fundamentally wrong is that true collaboration depends on the dignity of privacy. Without the ability to withdraw and think clearly, we can’t offer our best selves to others. Proximity isn’t connection. Trust and autonomy are.
Idea for Impact: Organizations advance when individuals can think without distraction. To deny employees the conditions for sustained thought isn’t efficiency. It’s regression. Both performance and collaboration require something hot-desking systematically withholds: the space to think, and the trust that makes that space feel safe.
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