False Economies

Buckled_Rims

If you're really worried, try the "health and safety" route of complaining.

If you have health problems, for example, dermatitis, an allergy or visual needs this may prevent you from hot desking or sharing.

Lay it on man :!:

the_hundredth_idiot

rjsterry wrote:

The big problem with all this working from home is that it destroys any sort of office morale/social cohesion. Maybe not important for everyone, but it makes a hell of a difference to the way our office works.

That, plus a bit more.

Hot-desking makes sense when people are genuinely out of the office a lot (say, auditors) who really just need a touch down space for when they are in the office. But it's an appalling set-up for someone who comes into the same office day in, day out.

Every man's home is his castle and all that. We nest at home because it makes us feel more secure - a house with no personal effects wouldn't feel like much of a home (and I say that as someone whose home is perhaps more minimal than many).

Nesting in the office also makes us more secure and, I would guess, more productive (looking at the photos on my desk of my two sons reminds me that I'm working hard to provide for them - without that I would have much less motivation). Hot-desking is one of those wrong-headed ideas cooked up by management consultants paying too much attention to the P&L and no attention to employee psychology. Make people hot-desk and they feel less secure in their position, less happy in their work and before you know it they are thinking about finding a new job. Which is fine if that's what management want (if, perhaps, a sneaky way of going about it) but I suspect it's done by management thinking about the cost of office space and forgetting about employee morale.

jimmypippa

As you don't work in the private sector, there maybe isn't quite an equivalent, but where I have worked, there has been a calculation as to what an hour of engineer-time costs to the companies. This is (maybe) about 5-8 times what the hourly wage would be.

Even in the public sector, surely* it must be seen that saving a few hundred quid on a couple of laptops is going to be outweighed by the additional cost of inefficient work?



*OK maybe not - my dad used to work for MAFF, and he has told me some stories to make me doubt this.