An obituary for hot-desking: The dreadfully unnatural stain on office culture is finally on its way out

The modern perversion was supposed to be egalitarian, in reality, it was only successfully inflicted on those at the bottom of the economic food chain

According to the leaks about the government’s “exit strategy” (which name makes it sounds grimmer than it ought to), one of the many surprising consequences of the coronavirus pandemic will be the imminent abolition by statute of “hot-desking”.

If you’ve not worked it out for yourself, hot-desking, or “non-reservation-based hoteling” in the jargon, helps spread our modern plague, leaving lurgy on keyboards and the line, and cannot be allowed to persist. Soon, then, will be gone one of the most dispiriting innovations in the dispiriting history of corporate culture.

The thing about hot-desking was the vast gulf between that go-go sounding name for it, and humiliating reality. “Hot-desking" made it sound all dynamic, like you were some office superhero swooping around the open-plan room, troubleshooting and problem-solving.

You were supposed to think it was the kind of thing kids in Silicon Valley all did as they were inventing the next revolutionary software, though they most likely didn’t. It was supposed to be egalitarian, so no one ever got to permanently bag the space next to the window, or be lumbered until the retirement with the desk nearest the bogs.

Hot-desking, like the Stalinist conception of the collective farm, was supposed to liberate us from our petty bourgeois selfish obsessions and forge us into a “team”, all working together towards common goals. This world had no time to worry about where you’d left your stuff or forgetting how to reprogramme the phone. Hot-desking, like a mission statement, luridly decorated break-out zones and a cycle to work scheme was the hallmark of a progressive working environment.

Except it never was. It was there to save on office space and the rent; perfectly respectable motives, but rarely admitted and thus hot-desking grew doubly resented, for the pathetic subterfuge. The bosses stayed in their glass cubes.

We like places to call our own, whether it is in aircraft hanger-sized call centres or some country solicitors chambers. We prefer, for primaeval reasons, to know where we are, in every sense. A place to plonk our favourite gonk, our own coffee mug (with our own personalised slogan, be it “World’s Best Dad” or “Smash the Patriarchy”) and a framed photo of partner/kids (does anyone apart from the Queen still do that?).

What we don’t want is a weary embarrassing trudge around the workplace all-too-obviously trying not to end up having to spend the day next to that bloke who grunts incessantly, or the one-night stand that went a bit wrong, or someone who tried to get you sacked. Even worse, you might have to sit next to a stranger, or being told just as you pull the chair back “er, someone’s sitting there”, only to see it still vacant at going-home time.

Hot-desking was a modern perversion, only successfully inflicted on any sustainable basis on those at the bottom of the economic food chain. It was unnatural. Even when we go to the football or a favourite restaurant we know where we like to sit. We’ve our favoured chair at home. Even in the chamber of the House of Commons, a theoretical “hot benching” environment, the knackered backbenchers have their unofficial domain, as Dennis Skinner enjoyed for decades.

Long after the work of Lord Shaftesbury, Seebohm Rowntree and George Orwell had exposed and banished previous social evils, now we have a sub-microscopic organism to thank for creating a more humane workplace for office drones. The “new normal” may not be so bad.