Hate hot-desking? Here's the perfect way to avoid it.

“Hot-desking”: the practice in an office of allocating desks to workers when they are required or on a rota system, rather than giving each worker their own desk. Definition courtesy of Google

Imagine arriving at work and scurrying  around to find a place to sit, like you are playing a deranged game of Musical Chairs, only to find all the “good” desks are taken, leaving you with the one closest to the toilet, or the one with the stationary stored underneath it.

Not. Fun.

I am yet to meet someone who likes the idea of hot-desking at work. It’s a stupid idea that gained traction a couple of years ago with an alarming number of Australian businesses implemented the practice including Westpac, Macquarie Bank, Microsoft, Jones Lang LaSalle, GPT Goodman Group, Commonwealth Bank, Ernst & Young and NAB.

Why would any workplace think hot-desking is a good idea? Do they want us to feel insecure? Do they want us to feel ass though we don’t really belong and are living on borrowed time? If that’s what they are trying to achieve? Then mission accomplished.

In theory the concept of hot-desking is supposed to increase efficiency and teamwork. It’s thought to lead to a results-driven culture rather enabling clock-watching. How it increases efficiency when you have to spend 15 minutes setting up your desk every single day is beyond me.

Another philosophy behind hot-desking is the forced mixing of staff, so you end up sitting next to different people each day and interacting with them when you normally wouldn’t. In fantasy land this would lead to bonding and increased understanding of each other’s roles in the business. In theory, not so much because everyone ends up fighting to sit next to the guy with the chocolate stash or the girl who always offers to make people cups of tea.

On the flip side, wouldn't that also lead to people who don't get along sitting as far away from each other as possible, even if they are meant to be on the same team or working on the same project, thus prolonging their workplace estrangement? That doesn't sound too helpful.

Insiders say that hot-desking isn't achieving any of it's goals and is even creating problems that never before existed.

 "It's like being in high school, at the end of the day you pack up your books and papers and go home," one hot-desker told Business Insider Australia. 

"Everyone pretty much sits at the same desk anyway," another insider told me, adding that it's the late-starters and part-timers left to find a free desk, as though they are being punished.

Dropped the kids off at school, did you? Well then, here's the crappy desk.

This may seem a little paranoid but maybe hot-desking is really about ensuring workers are completely mobile, carrying all of our work equipment - files, papers, books, computers - with us everywhere which conveniently means we are in a position to log in and do some work at all times.

The thing is, we are not cattle, and hot-desking makes us feel like farm animals jostling for the best position on a fresh field of grass. We are actually human beings with feelings and a biological nesting instinct. We want our homes-away-from-home to be ours by leaving water jugs, coffee mugs, photos and books right there on our desks.

Some workplaces enforce hot-desking by clearing desks of all items each evening, storing any found personal items in a corner of shame as if to say, "Nice try loser", leaving you not only to find a new desk the next day but to try and retrieve all of your personal items.

There's also stories of senior staff sending their minions to demand workers move from some of the better desks so they can sit themselves there instead.

To me hot-desking is how uninspired management motivate their staff by breeding fear and insecurity instead of proven techniques such as earning their respect, inspiring them and helping them to fulfill their individual work goals.

Maybe we'll get used to hot-desking, like we got used to open-plan offices. Remember how annoying they were at first? All that noise while you tried to call clients and difficulty concentrating on anything whatsoever? We adapted to that...eventually.

Still, hot-desking is just way too annoying to have a future in workplaces that prefer logical work place solutions. They are a bad idea, a bit like the oh so trendy hover boards some (wankers) professions use to make their way around their open-plan, hot-desking offices.

What are your least favourite office space developments of the past few years?