Nowhere to Think

I’m annoyed.

I’m sitting at my desk. The woman next to me is on a Teams call with six people who all have their cameras turned off. Now’s she’s gesturing at the camera over her screen. It’s impossible to concentrate. I release a disdainful, sighing sound, but she doesn’t notice. I’m in the wrong. Meetings at desks are deemed more important than being able to do focused work.

We have a hot desking policy at our office, so I have no idea who she is. I found her next to me this morning when I arrived, and she’s spent most of the day talking to people on her monitor. I look around. I think a couple of people sitting two rows behind me are in the same meeting with her.

I marvel at how ineffective my noise cancelling headphones are at drowning out her voice. To aid in the cause, I have Brian Eno’s Apollo: Atmosphere and Soundtracks – Extended Edition barking in my ears, but broken words still find their way into my consciousness whenever there’s a lull in Eno’s synth sounds.

Fifteen years ago, this was unthinkable. Most offices demanded a reasonable level of silence and privacy. One’s desk was the place where one could expect, even demand quiet. It was the space reserved for concentration, the place where you did ‘the work.’

We must collaborate.

And then something shifted. The idea seemed to have taken hold in the early 2000s. It was the idea that office spaces needed to become places that encouraged group work and collaboration. Universities also grabbed a hold of this idea and started lumping students into teams to deliver assignments and projects. I was doing post graduate study in the late 2000s and was sure that this idea of group work was designed to limit the number of papers lecturers needed to evaluate.

Offices shifted to being more open plan. Cubicles made way for partitions and eventually we did away with walls altogether. In the name of collaboration and teamwork corporations have inadvertently started to wage a war on people’s ability to engage in deep, knowledge-based work.

And then we got ‘hot desking.’

Not many know that hot desking was originally introduce in 1993 by ad agency, TBWA Chiat/Day. Hot desking, the concept that one doesn’t have an allocated desk, that all desks are shared and allocated on a first-come-first-served basis was an experiment the agency introduced to encourage greater creativity and team cohesion.

Today most companies seem to have adopted the hot desking practice and with that, gone are the days where family photos and plants regale office spaces. We’ve standardised offices to be uniform, with plug-in-and-hope-it-works technology with the aim to optimise square meterage and to enable the ever-precious collaboration and the sharing of ideas.

What nobody’s talking about is the fact that TBWA Chiat/Day gave up on the experiment after a few months, once it became evident that employees opted not to come into the office at all than to face the discomfort of finding a space to sit and having to spend 8 hours with people who they didn’t have anything to share with. Apparently, most of the agency’s creative teams went to the pub to work. I’m still waiting for that idea to take hold.

Hello COVID.

For the first eight months of COVID I found myself in lockdown. I worked for a couple of weeks at the beginning before being ‘stood down.’

Those initial weeks were novel. We jumped on calls, shared Friday afternoon drinks over camera and tried to connect by sharing where we’d rather be drinking together. However, it soon felt hollow. Having a cocktail with someone in a bar after work is significantly different to drinking with them over a Teams call. Teams call drinking still felt like drinking alone.

COVID was the time where we all transformed our homes to offices away from the office with office chairs, desks monitors, laptops, and printers. And as we realised that Wi-Fi can be a tax deduction, some of us spent an inordinate amount of time deciding what background image reflected the truest version of our professional persona.

And after two years we abruptly went into full back-to-work mode, but at home. Back-to-back meetings were just that, jumping from one virtual space to the next with the click of a mouse, while our smart devices nagged us for not standing enough or attaining the expected number of steps for the day. And it became evident that our backgrounds weren’t all that important.

And then we came back to the office.

I like being in the office. I enjoy the interactions I have with my colleagues. Being at home I feel disconnected and obsess about what is happening at the office in my absence. The fact that this is speaks to a deeper issue around control, isn’t lost on me.

But being back at the office, for part of the week at least, didn’t help us shake the need for virtual/Teams/Zoom meetings. And in the switch, desk-space etiquette changed with zero consultation. While people were back in the office, we weren’t all back in the office at the same time. There have been occasions where I was to have a meeting with twelve people only to find myself in a large meeting room, alone, speaking to my colleagues on my laptop screen.

And then meeting rooms started being left off meeting requests all together. The idea seemed to be, ‘I’m not in the office so I don’t have to bother booking a room, everyone can just dial in, and if they’re in the office people can dial in from their desks.’

This is where I find myself today. Where I’m sitting now, I can see a vacant meeting room, however, the person sitting next to me would rather chat to her colleagues here, at her hot desk, next to me, than go into that room.

So, I’ll go. I can make the room my office for the day.

The consequences and the stats.

The Journal of Environmental Psychology conducted a study over ten years ago, interviewing 42,000 office workers across the US, Canada, Australia, and Finland. Their findings boiled down to the following:

"Our results categorically contradict the industry-accepted wisdom that open-plan layout enhances communication between colleagues and improves occupants' overall work environmental satisfaction."

Another study from the Auckland University of Technology showed that hot desking increased distrust, hindered communication, garnered less organisational commitment and amplified status inequality.

Studies have found that in open plan and noisy offices executives sped 30% less time on strategic thinking. There is also a correlation between increased office density and decreased strategic initiatives.

And organisations with hot desking set ups saw complex project completion times extend by 12%-18%.

The conversation we should be having.

The past two decades have seen corporates engage in a war against effective work. As I pack up my stuff to claim that empty meeting room, I can't help but think I've become a kind of office refugee. Companies have spent millions redesigning offices to encourage collaboration while actually making real teamwork harder to achieve.

The biggest irony is that after COVID forced us all home, companies are now desperate to get workers back into these spaces that are fundamentally hostile to deep thinking. No mandates or threats will fix this contradiction. We need to completely rethink the workplace - one that gives us space for both social connection and quiet focus. Until that happens, you'll find me hiding out in empty meeting rooms, stairwells, or like those TBWA Chiat/Day creatives back in 1993, working from the nearest pub.