Thankfully, the days of more desks than people are diminishing, with forward-thinking clients taking opportunities provided by events such as lease breaks to right-size their spaces. But there’s still an element of guesswork involved in what the future might hold. And yes, we still have clients who want every employee to have their own desk. Our role is to introduce them to other types of spaces which could work in tandem with an allocated desk to create a more interesting and functional work environment.
Is the desk (allocated or not) still king?
While the aspiration is for variety and choice, with spaces to support productivity and encourage people to come into the office in greater numbers, it’s still the case that the desk is king for many. Why? There are two main reasons:
- The desk is a safety net.
It’s somewhere to put your bag, jacket and laptop (regardless of whether you are in meeting rooms for most of the day or not). No one said human beings were rational animals. - We’re creatures of habit (some would say lazy) and moving is a pain.
How many times have you heard people say “there’s too much noise in the office” while quiet rooms and meeting booths lie empty less than 10-metres away?
At Workplace Trends in April 2023, Dan Wakelin (then of HCG) talked about the potential death of activity-based working (ABW), and I heavily paraphrase here, low attendances meant there wasn’t the compelling need to switch settings to a location more appropriate to the task. Essentially, empty offices mean that if it’s convenient and not disturbing others, why not do everything at your desk?
In one of our projects, the schedule of accommodation went from “that sounds like a call centre” in the client’s eyes to “I don’t think that’s enough desks” and then back to our original proposition – with a few more desks added in (for safety). Of course, the predicted attendance patterns never materialised and because of that, it was never clear whether the desk was still king or whether people were making use of all the different spaces they had asked for. We never carried out a utilisation study and thus were never able to test Wakelin’s assertion regarding ABW and acceptable transgressions.
In science, modelling and experimentation go hand in hand. We need utilisation studies to come back into fashion, where we look at busy offices that have been transformed into environments with a much greater range of settings – busy being the key word. Then we can truly verify whether the desk is indeed still king or whether the throne has been taken by something else.
If the desk still comes out on top, it could tell us one or all of three things: the type of work in that specific organisation is desk-based (in which case the layout should be desk-heavy), it might confirm that people are indeed creatures of habit, or it might speak volumes about the quality of the spaces provided for Teams calls or informal collaboration.
If the desk has been deposed, great let’s adapt our models. If the desk is no longer king, what’s your money on being the new safety net?
