Hot Desking vs Activity Based Working (ABW)

In workplaces all over the world, the same question keeps getting asked, “to desk share, or not to desk share, that is the question.” Well, if what’s being proposed is hot desking, then the answer is a firm “no, don’t desk share,” and I’m sure Shakespeare would agree with me.

Frank Lloyd Wright introduced the open plan office concept in the early 20th century, and I’d say hot desking might be the single worst thing to happen to the workplace in all that time. It turns people off desk sharing altogether, and it lets a cost-cutting exercise hide behind the language of workplace design.

Hot desking, desk sharing, Activity Based Working (ABW), surely this is all just word play and semantics I hear you say? “Desk sharing is hot desking, they’re all the same, and at the end of the day I don’t get my own desk anymore”. Well, let’s ask Shakespeare again, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” There’s some logic to that, but treating these terms as identical is factually wrong, and the gap between them is the gap between a poor workplace experience and a great place to work.

This post looks at what hot desking is, what ABW is, where the plain old, assigned desk still belongs, and how to tell the difference when your organisation is selling you one and calling it the other.

To desk share, or not to desk share, that is the question.

Key Takeaways

• Desk sharing is the umbrella term. It covers hot desking, in the US you’ll hear it also called desk hoteling, and it’s a core component of Activity Based Working (ABW). All it really means is that people don’t have their own permanent desk in the office.

  
  

• Hot desking is desk sharing done badly. Brought in to cut property costs by providing fewer desks than people and squeezing the floor down to less space than the organisation probably needs. First come, first served, or in plain terms, a daily bun fight for a desk.

  
  

• ABW is desk sharing done well. A deliberately designed range of work settings, which includes desks, matched to the activities people actually do across a week, supported by the engagement and culture that earn genuine buy in.

  
  

• Assigned desks still have a place. For some organisations, keeping a portion of assigned desks is absolutely the right answer for them and their teams. Certain specialist roles, or those with a disability or with heavily customised desk setups can all make a fair case for staying assigned.

  
  

• Hot desking loves to masquerade as ABW. Plenty of organisations roll out hot desking and call it ABW without ever adding the settings that make ABW what it is. The tell is simple. The desks come out and the floor shrinks at the same time. Done properly, the space you free up by sharing desks is reinvested in the settings that make ABW work, not handed straight back to the landlord.

Desk sharing is the umbrella term

A good place to start is by understanding the different terms that get used when people talk about desk sharing.

Desk sharing just means not giving every person their own permanent desk. It carries a bad reputation in some quarters, but the term itself is neutral. Plenty of brilliant workplaces share desks, and plenty of miserable ones do too. The word tells you nothing about whether it’s been done well.

There are really three main ways to allocate desks in an office. The first is assigned seating, where everyone has their own desk usually with their name on it, the way offices ran for most of the last century, before flexible technology let office workers also work outside the office.

The other two are both forms of desk sharing, and this is where the confusion thrives, because while they’re related, twins even, one is definitely the evil twin. Speaking of which, the evil twin is hot desking (also known as hoteling) and the other is Activity Based Working (ABW). Lumping them together because they both involve desk sharing is like treating an out-of-tune violin and a Stradivarius as the exact same thing, ignoring how much more beautiful the instrument sounds when it is perfectly in tune with the rest of the orchestra.

So, when someone says they’re against desk sharing, what they almost always mean is they’re against hot desking, because that’s the version they’ve suffered through. Fair enough. But it’s worth being precise, because throwing out desk sharing to avoid hot desking also throws out ABW, and that’s a genuine loss. Not all desk sharing is the same.

Three flavours of ice cream

If it helps, think of it as ice cream.

Assigned desks are vanilla. Familiar, dependable, in many cases the only option. For a lot of organisations vanilla is exactly right, and we’ll come back to that.

Hot desking is green tea (matcha) ice cream. It arrives with all the promise of ice cream, and then you taste it and realise the horrors it brings (sorry matcha fans), and you’re left wondering who thought this was a good thing to do to a perfectly good workplace I mean dessert.

ABW is Neapolitan. It isn’t one flavour, it’s a considered combination of several, sitting together by design so there’s something to suit whatever you need or are in the mood for. That’s the point of ABW, it provides a much greater range of work settings, it eviscerates wasted space while driving efficiency, and it gives you real flexibility to adapt as teams grow or projects are formed that need people to collaborate together.

Three flavours of desk sharing ice cream

What is hot desking?

Hot desking is, at its core, a property cost lever.

The logic is simple and entirely financial. If everyone is no longer coming in every day, then you don’t need a desk for every person every day, so you reduce the number of desks below headcount, shrink the floorplate you’re paying for, and bank the rental savings. People turn up and take whatever desk is free, first come first served, and that’s the system. Think reserving a deck chair at a Costa del Sol hotel at 6am with a towel.

Nothing is designed to replace what’s been taken away. The desk is removed and nothing of equal value goes in its place. The financial savings are real, but at what cost to your employee retention and culture?

That’s the flaw with hot desking. It’s a decision made on a spreadsheet about floor space costs, not a decision made about what you need to do your best work. And because it starts and ends with cost, it never asks the question that good workplace strategy exists to answer, which is how these particular people do their best work, and what they need from the space to do it.

How hot desking can impact people

It’s actually quite stressful and anxiety inducing for a lot of people. Especially those with a propensity for heavy personalisation of the workstation, or nesting habits, and those with long lengths of tenure. Many people can start to see it as an existential threat to their longevity at the organisation.

People react to it in different ways. Some refuse to play ball and start a quiet land grab. The most senior, or the most likely to kick off (we all know at least one in the office), stake an unspoken claim to their preferred spots and return to them day after day, and everyone else learns to leave those desks alone. Others quietly grumble and complain in hushed voices and just add it to the list of drudgery they already experience in the role.

And there are others who genuinely don’t let it bother them; they come in and do the job regardless of where they sit. Have laptop, will work. Standard desk, hot desk, milk crate, just give me Wi-Fi and coffee and that’s all I need. This is actually why hot desking can prevail for so long in organisations. The savings are good, and the apathy is just strong enough that the staff aren’t picketing outside the office.

What is Activity Based Working (ABW)

The most important word in ABW is not Working, it’s Activity. The entire premise is predicated on understanding what people do all day, today and in the future. It’s literally about the activities the staff need to do. From this starting point of evidence collection, a concept design can be developed. This is where we transition from the typical, narrow set of settings we normally see; desk, private office, meeting room, to a richer, broader range that not only improves the existing settings but adds new ones, such as phone booths, smaller unbookable meeting spaces, project spaces, collaborative areas, focus spaces, touchdown tables and more.

Understanding those activities is also what lets you right-size the space, because you can plan around how people actually attend. A company of 1000 people working 100% assigned desks could have the CEO give everyone a month’s notice that on a particular day 100% of people must physically attend, and it would still be lucky to get past 80% attendance. Because life gets in the way; people are working elsewhere, they’re training, they’re sick, they’re on holiday, some emergency has occurred that they need to deal with. There is nothing wrong with that, but there is also nothing wrong with planning accordingly, otherwise your company is wasting money on expensive unused desks and real estate.

The above is quite neat and tidy and involves mainly data collection and observation. Where it gets messier, and where ABW implementations fail the most, is of course the employee engagement. If it wasn’t for the people this whole thing would be very straightforward, but it’s literally for the people that we must do this and do it properly. Everyone deserves a great place to work, and a genuine and authentic attempt to get there.

There is a lot more to how ABW actually gets designed and delivered, the evidence gathering, the occupancy modelling, the full settings mix and how you flex it as the organisation grows, but that is a whole piece in its own right, and one I will cover in a separate post - what is Activity Based Working (ABW)?

The potential to create a great place to work through ABW is exactly why I hate to see hot desking muddying the pristine waters of true ABW.

When assigned desks are the right call

Yes, I am clearly a fan of ABW, and a hater of hot desking, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still have room in my heart for the assigned desk.

Assigned seating is a perfectly good model for many situations, such as PAs and EAs, where having them perform the “anchor” role in a neighbourhood is often a win win for everyone. There are also those with disabilities, or individuals with very bespoke requirements that simply don’t fit into a more standardised workstation offering, and that’s fine.

Assigned desks can sit side by side with ABW, but the balance must be right. Too many fixed desk users will make the boat list to one side and will upset the desk sharers. Get this balance wrong and it will undermine the adoption of ABW. There should be a strict rationale for fixing someone to a desk. It’s not a case of want; it must be a case of need.

The wolf in sheep’s clothing

Something to watch out for, and unfortunately highly prevalent, is hot desking masquerading as ABW. A wolf in sheep’s clothing.

An organisation pulls the property cost lever, strips out the desks and shrinks the floor, exactly as it would for plain hot desking, then reaches for the language of ABW to make the medicine go down with the employees. The slide deck is all settings and activities and choice and agility. The actual office is a sea of near-identical desks, a couple of soft chairs parked by the window, and a meeting room someone has hopefully relabelled the collaboration zone. The words are ABW. But look closer and it’s all just hot desking, like a pig in lipstick.

The staff always smell it almost immediately, people aren’t stupid, they know! There’s nowhere proper to take a call, nowhere to do focused work that isn’t just another desk like all the rest, nowhere a team can genuinely settle in together. The settings that make ABW actually work cost extra and take up space, so naturally they’re the bit that got cut, and what’s left is a cosy battery farm aesthetic to your workplace.

And the damage doesn’t stop at that one office. This is exactly what tars the whole approach with the same brush. Someone suffers through one of these counterfeits, walks away convinced ABW is a con, and carries that conviction into the next job, and the one after that. Real ABW ends up taking the blame for the failures of its impersonator, and the whole idea gets harder to do well everywhere, because half the room has already been burned by the fake. That is the longer term impact of hot desking on the industry. It doesn’t just fail the people stuck inside it, it poisons the well for everyone who comes after.

The Hot Desking Wolf in the ABW Sheep's clothing

Frequently asked questions

Is hot desking the same as Activity Based Working?

No, and the difference is fundamental. Hot desking reduces the number of desks to save on property costs and leaves people to take whatever’s free, with nothing designed to replace the desk that’s gone. ABW provides a deliberately designed range of work settings matched to the tasks people actually do, supported by engagement and culture. Both involve sharing desks. Only one is built around the activities needed to do the work.

Is hot desking bad?

In my experience, yes, almost always, because it keeps the cost saving of sharing while designing away everything that would have made sharing worthwhile. The problem isn’t sharing a desk, it’s sharing a desk with no alternative settings, no thought for how people work, and no engagement to bring anyone along.

Does ABW mean nobody has an assigned desk?

Not quite. A real ABW workplace is mostly desk sharing by design, but it can include some assigned desks, allowed against strict criteria agreed at the highest level. The discipline is keeping those exceptions few and fair, so the system doesn’t quietly collapse back into a two tier office.

What’s the difference between hot desking and desk sharing?

Desk sharing is the umbrella term for any model where people don’t each have a permanent desk. Hot desking is one version of it, the version done purely to cut property cost. ABW is another version, the one done properly. So hot desking is a type of desk sharing, not the opposite of it.

Can you still have a private office in an ABW environment?

Yes, is the short answer. The slightly longer consideration is to think about the optics for those who are desk sharing. It’s common for organisations to keep some private offices, and what they do is adapt. They have fewer offices, often only for executives, they relocate them from the corner to the central areas so the desk sharers benefit from more natural light, and the offices are usually smaller and built flexibly, so they can double up as bookable meeting spaces when the executive is not using them.

hot desking vs activity based working

Hot desking vs Activity Based Working - hopefully you now think I have made a pretty strong and compelling case for pouring cold water on to hot desking. First let's agree to stop lumping hot desking and ABW together just because they both involve sharing a desk. They are not the same thing. They never were.

If you’re considering hot desking, pause, take a breath, then stop and throw it in the bin. Then consider ABW and find the right partner to support your successful implementation. If you’re a senior leader and you land it right, it’s genuinely legacy level stuff and you’ll leave your imprint on the organisation. Don’t let hot desking be your legacy.

This blog was written by Work Future, a workplace strategy and workplace transformation consultancy based in Perth, WA. We work out how your people actually work, then design the workplace around it, whether that’s ABW, assigned seating, or the right balance of both. If you’d like to talk through desk sharing, ABW, or what would genuinely suit your organisation, contact the team at hello@workfuture.com.au or +61 0435 824 305.