The Badger’s lucky because he has an ‘office’ at home – a room complete with a desk, storage cabinets, and IT. It’s the Badger’s space for creative thinking, working, and administering modern life. It has a proper desk, one with character and scars that shows that it has been at the heart of creativity and endeavour for years. The IT sits neatly on it, just like the pen, notepad, and the other odds and ends that personalise the space.
This week, while sitting at the desk, the Badger found himself reflecting on commentaries about how employers offices will be impacted after the remote working of white-collar staff during the pandemic. It soon dawned on the Badger that the longest tenure he has had with any desk is with the one he was sitting at! The Badger realised that during 35 years in the IT industry he had occupied many different ‘desks’ in employer/client offices, and that he had experienced numerous transformations of office environments. Indeed, the Badger was often part of the decision-making teams that initiated these transformations!
Having an office format that would attract new staff, help employee retention, and support changing business needs were always factors in decision making, but reducing overheads by increasing the density of staff in the same floor area was always a dominant factor. Thus, over time, proper physical desks and filing cabinets in discreet rooms gave way to ‘Open Plan’ with smaller ‘table’ surfaces and wheeled under-desk units, which in turn gave way to ‘Hot Desking’ where a surface in a long lines of regimented identical ones, with no storage space, had to be booked to be used. The Badger, and most in the IT sector, never found such transformations too problematic because remote and flexible working – anytime, anyplace, anywhere – has been part of work patterns for many decades. However, for white-collar people and their employers in other sectors, see BP for example, the pandemic has triggered a structural shift in work patterns and a big rethink by employers of the role, form, and scale of their offices.
Long before the pandemic, ‘Open Plan’ was giving way to more ‘agile’ environments, and now the pandemic has skewered ‘Hot Desking’ too – see here and here , for example. Time will tell, but many employers now have under-used offices and their white-collar employees know they can work remotely and productively without commuting to an impersonal worksurface at their employer’s office. Change is inevitable. So, is ‘the death of the physical desk’ finally nigh? The Badger doesn’t think so. Why? Because, like so much in today’s world, there will be a hybrid solution to the future of work with much more flexible working. Having a physical desk that you can call your own will feature in this future because it has psychological, functional, productivity and practical merits which complement the virtual desk that your laptop and cyberspace constitutes. Just don’t look to your employer for one. Have your physical desk at home and be amazed how quickly you get attached to it!
