60 Business The EconomistSeptember 28th 2019
2Bartleby Hot desk, cold comfort
Economist.com/blogs/bartlebyT
he heroof “The Prisoner”, a cult
British tv show, wakes up one day in
a mysterious village. His possessions
have vanished and he is not referred to by
his real name but as “number six”. His
every attempt at escape is frustrated and
each episode ends with a set of iron bars
superimposed on his face.
The experience of the Prisoner will be
wearily familiar to one class of office
worker: those who undergo the daily trial
of “hot-desking”. Every day, they may
wind up in a new location, with only the
possessions they can carry to sustain
them. At the end of each day, all trace of
their personality is erased, in the way
that the Soviet Union removed pictures
of Leon Trotsky from the historical re-
cord. It is hard to think of a clearer in-
dication that the individual worker is
being treated as an anonymous drone.
At one leading financial institution,
any employee who accidentally leaves a
possession on their desk overnight must
try to retrieve it from Lost Property in the
morning. That makes the end of each
working day feel like the last frenetic
minutes before you leave the house for a
holiday, frantically checking that you
haven’t left anything behind.
The start of the day can be stressful,
too. A survey of British workers, pub-
lished in June, found that those in a
hot-desking office took an average of 18
minutes to find a seat. That translates
into 66 wasted hours a year. In some
offices the temptation must be to get in
early to grab the best places, like holiday-
makers placing towels on the poolside
chairs before breakfast. In other work-
places some seats will be tacitly reserved
for those with seniority; who would dare
sit in the seat of the person who decides
your work rota?
It is hard to see how anyone will bewell-motivated by such an arrangement. If
companies want employees to have bright
ideas, it helps if they feel comfortable at
their desks. And people are likely to feel
most comfortable in familiar surround-
ings. Hot-desking is usually linked to
another design feature: the open-plan
office. The professed aim may be to pro-
mote team working, but it does not neces-
sarily work. A study published last year
found that face-to-face interactions de-
clined in open-plan offices and the use of
emails rose after companies had switched
from more traditional layouts.
Bartleby will admit that his own desk is
a byword for clutter. Along with the sur-
rounding area, it is covered with books he
has enjoyed and wants to keep; books he
has started to read and ought to finish;
books that he genuinely means to read
soon; and books he will probably never
read but feels too guilty to throw away. In
addition, there are academic papers and
magazines that fit in the same categories.
Arnold Schwarzenegger would struggle to
carry all this home and back every day.
Were The Economistto become a hot-desking hub, all this stuff would be kept
at home or thrown away. And with it
would go those moments of serendipity,
when a news story or press release sparks
the memory of a similar tale in a book or
magazine that is close at hand.
Of course, a lot of people find it im-
possible to work in the midst of such
clutter. And there is nothing to stop them
from keeping their own desks as tidy as
they like. But hot-desking is not becom-
ing more common because it is popular
with workers. A survey by Workplace
Unlimited of employees who worked in a
range of office types found hot-desking
was ranked fifth out of six office designs
(perhaps surprisingly, private offices
were ranked last).
The growth of hot-desking flows from
the growing number of businesses that
use hordes of freelance workers and
contractors. Assigning them a perma-
nent desk is not practical. The same may
be true for those who work from home
two or three days a week or are constant-
ly on the road, visiting clients. By reduc-
ing office space, hot-desking saves em-
ployers money; the average annual
property cost for a British office worker is
£4,800 ($6,000), according to Invest-
ment Property Databank.
But freelancing and part-time work
are not yet the norm. The risk is that, in
the name of cost-cutting, hot-desking is
imposed on full-time employees, who
would prefer the certainty of a perma-
nent work station. Your cosy desk will
become as spartan as a monastic cell.
Workers should echo the Prisoner and
bellow: “I’m not a number. I’m a free
man. And here is a pot plant, a novelty
coffee mug and a framed picture of my
kids to prove it.”Office design that treats workers like dronesthe Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, told an
academic conference on September 20th
that “this new model for offices has the po-
tential for a run on commercial real estate”.
First, he observes, co-working firms gener-
ally acquire long-term leases for office
space that they lease out for shorter dura-
tions to small companies. Smaller firms
are more vulnerable to a recession—and,
by relying on them for revenue, so are the
co-working firms. Next, co-working firms
often put leases for individual locations in
special-purpose entities that prevent land-
lords from making a claim on the co-work-ing firms’ entire balance-sheet if they fail
to pay the lease. Finally, the argument goes,
if landlords are hit, their banks might face
losses on loans to them.
But special-purpose vehicles are noth-
ing new in the office-rental industry. Most
property-owners “have already priced in
the fragility”, says Joseph Pagliari of the
University of Chicago’s Booth School of
Business. Big corporations, which are less
likely to be felled by a recession, now ac-
count for some two-fifths of WeWork’s
leases. WeWork’s prospectus did reveal
some $47bn in lease obligations globally; ifWeWork went belly up tomorrow, its coun-
terparties would be hit. As with its debt,
though, that big number is still just a frac-
tion of $14trn-17trn in commercial-proper-
ty leases in America alone. True, flexible
workspaces account for 8% of new com-
mercial leases in America. But when as-
sessing systemic risk it is the stock that
matters most. Colliers, a property-manage-
ment firm, puts this at just 1.6% of all office
space in the top 19 cities in America in
mid-2018. Even if WeWork proves a house
of cards, it should not shake the founda-
tions of America’s financial system. 7