I once quit a big tech company triggered by a desk move.
All of the social disruption described here is true. I also felt an environmental gentrification: my “secret” window spot, where the data engineers were stuffed into, being hijacked by “more important” salespeople… I still remember the feeling when they walked over and surveyed my land, smiling in delight of their new gains.
All of this is to say: people belong to spaces, too.
> I think hotdesking/hoteling is worse than any desk move because you get to have the feeling of uneasiness and disruption daily.
It's interesting to observe how many companies deliberately adopt policies which they _know_ cause employees to be less effective workers. It really does make you think, although... I don't know _what_ it makes me think.
Like, to me, this is trivial. I know what people want from a working space. They want a little nook they can customise and personalise, a little space that they can both retreat into when they need to concentrate and invite people into when they need to discuss. A cubicle isn't perfect - an office with a closed door would be best - but a cubicle works.
Yet cubicles have been utterly abandoned in favour of open-plan offices, which I've literally never seen anyone say anything positive about. Ever.
It's just... how does this occur? And the smug reddit answer 'all CEOS are dark triad' isn't it because CEOs are not making these decisions.
>Like, to me, this is trivial. I know what people want from a working space. They want a little nook they can customise and personalise
This is what really gets me. The open floorplan can be attributed to delusional concepts of collaboration, but not having fixed desks makes no sense. Even with hot desking, humans being creatures of habit, most people will end up sitting at the exact same desk every day (and will get annoyed if someone else sits in "their" spot). Not giving people fixed desks just means they can't make the environment they spend half their waking hours in more pleasant, which is silly.
My old job had floating seats in the main office, at they were very proud about it and showed it off during hiring process. My branch office had fixed seats, but it wasn't uncommon for clients to have floating seats. With fixed seats you risk being placed far away from who you are working with, so when I'm just there for a few weeks I did actually enjoy it, but for a permanent position I would hate it.
But the pro's I remember hearing are: You get to sit with different people, you get to sit different place with different views. Desks looks clean, as people can't leave their stuff around. When you have visitors working (from other offices or consultants) it is easy to place them with people they are working with. When working in projects it is easy to change seating arrangement week to week or month to month to fit the changing project you are working on.
> Although I do notice that lots of people like to work from coffee shops so... I guess it might be pushing the same buttons...
I once had a severe emotional reaction to someone taking my stapler. Let's just say I caused a bit of desk shuffling in retaliation. I have no regrets, the place was toxic.
So the secret to BICEP is to gaslight your employees into agreeing to be pushed around.
On a serious note though, the closing paragraphs mention looking for the root cause of what’s causing someone to come to you asking for a raise or unhappy etc.
This is a powerful strategy, whenever someone comes to me in a 1-1 with an issue, I take some time to ask myself “what are they really saying?” It’s a simple yet strong technique for driving the conversation toward them opening up. Don’t just assume and not verify however.
Back when I was in an office, we switched desks once a quarter. We randomized the selection order each time and the only rules were you couldn't sit at the same desk or next to the same people. The value was that sitting next to new people created more social connections and created more trust and a change in scenery was refreshing.
Reason #6479 of why WFH is a godsend. Never again will I have to suffer a useless VP rearranging the floor for the nth time in their quest to optimize inter-team collaboration.
When possible, tie it back to company strategy or objectives (“it’s important for us to sit closer to our stakeholders”, or “this layout will improve our carbon footprint”).
These feel exactly like the kind of BS VP rearrangement you're mentioning. Moving desks improves our carbon footprint? What kind of coolaid do they drink and how am I supposed to control my urge to just burst out in loud laughter if my boss tells me that as a reason?
If it's "we're moving everyone downstairs so we can turn off the heating on the 6th floor" then it does. But yeah, even in that case it's better to skip the bullshit; if you've laid off a bunch of people and you're packing the people who are left into a smaller space to save money, if you tell them that, they'll understand.
The trick would we to move everyone from the first floor to the 6th, rent out the first floor and let them pay for "their" heating bill, knowing warm air goes up ;)
That would be a great explanation. Doesn't do squat for the carbon footprint either way tho.
> Doesn't do squat for the carbon footprint either way tho.
Yeah it does. Heating two half-empty floors will generally have a higher carbon footprint than one full floor one way or another, and especially if you then rent out the other floor you're saving a bunch of emissions (particularly given how much it takes to build new buildings).
The company doesn't actually care about the carbon footprint, of course, which is why it's a bullshit excuse, but it does have that positive effect.
I honestly believe the primary driver of organizational dysfunction is management's tendency to find justifications for things rather than actually understanding what they're doing and if it's necessary.
i imagine they think it's necessary in order for them to maintain power dynamic, but they aren't willing to convey that message. so they contrive creative "cover stories."
I now kind of want to figure out where you work and try to get a job there that would put me in a management position above you, just to show that even WFH is not enough to save you from stupid management rearrangement of things. It might go something like this:
> Morkalork, I've noticed in our team Zoom meetings when you look at something on your second monitor you look to the left. Everyone else has their second monitor on the right and its really distracting to see you go left when everyone else goes right.
> I'm going to need you to move that second monitor over to the right.
I’m disappointed that after our last talk, you decided to try and fake a “solution” rather than swapping your screens as we had agreed. I’m getting complaints that the “NY JETS” pennant in the background is flipped now.
The one time I had a Real job I had to suffer through a desk shuffle. I happened to go into the office early one day the next week to get some actual work done. Around 6:30–7am some guy walks up to me while I am programming and asks me a question. It took me 30 or 40 seconds to finish my thoughts and start to think about the question. By that time, he had walked off. His question turned out to be something like “How much has moving the desks around improved the working conditions around here?” Even after he was gone, I couldn’t figure out how to answer that question; to me moving desks around was mostly irrelevant, and I wasn’t even sure if it was possible for a shuffle to make any difference at all. At least not for engineering, where all of our communications can be done through email, bug trackers, version control, etc, etc. Later I learned that he was the CEO (oops!).
On the other hand, they at least had a good reason for the shuffle. They had been subleasing half of the floor to another company. As we were growing, they ended that lease and let every one expand into their place. This left plenty of open space for the new people who were hired that year.
Is that ever really the reason? More likely, a larger or more important team covets your location, so your dinky cost-center team will have to move to the dark center of the 'open' layout.
Hysterically enough, the IT and sysadmin team got put in what became known as "the cave" and never got moved out. At least they had a door they could close. The real short end of the stick in the 'open' floor was being beside sales and customer support.
I used to sit and stare at the walls in offices daydreaming about a better way. I would stare down at the green space around the office building and imagine small single room office cabins, where everyone had light, privacy, control over the local environment. I thought if it could be made to work this would be the ideal layout for engineering/design/whatever creative work. Funny thing, over a decade later I found out I just described working from home.
> Additionally, coach them to figure out how to find other avenues for their autonomy and choice. (In the desk move case: how will they decorate it? What day of the week could they start the move? How will they celebrate as a team once the move is checked off the list?) These should be realistic and doable, and will hopefully help address this core need.
Having extreme difficulty taking this as a serious suggestion.
> IME there is quite an overlap between the two...
Do you think there is an equation where the larger the company the more they treat the employees like toddlers? I've primarily worked for small companies where management treated the employees like adults. They expected us to be professionals so they treated us as such. Sometimes that meant they provided just enough rope for someone to hang themselves but for the most part, it worked pretty well.
As I've moved to bigger companies it seems as though management treats the employees more and more like children. The HR department is especially notorious for treating people like toddlers. I find it odd and a bit frustrating. I don't think I could be easily convinced that anyone within my team, department, or adjacent departments could be equated to children yet the actions and tone of management makes me think otherwise.
I dont know if there is an equation, but it think it just comes from bloated HT department. There is only so much Facebook and Instagram browsing that HR folks can do in one day, eventually they have to do some form of work. This translates into policies, forced trainings, migration from an HR system to another, etc etc.
HR is usually the team most disconnected from the rest of the company. They don't know what the company sells/produces. They don't know what are the important projects/deadlines in flight. They just do their thing.
All of the social disruption described here is true. I also felt an environmental gentrification: my “secret” window spot, where the data engineers were stuffed into, being hijacked by “more important” salespeople… I still remember the feeling when they walked over and surveyed my land, smiling in delight of their new gains.
All of this is to say: people belong to spaces, too.