Hotelling: Its Baaaack!
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 01.22.08
It started with Jay Chiat who had a vision: "Take away employees' cubicles and desks, equip them all with portable phones and Powerbooks, and turn them into wandering nomads who could perform their tasks wherever they liked." He hired Frank Gehry to design the building. It died a squalid death in 1998 when the firm abandoned the building and the idea and moved back into cubicles.
But times change, technologies improved, and now hotelling- also called hot-desking- is back- where employees don't have fixed desks or offices but work on the road, at home or in groups supported by the equipment they need. It saves a lot of space and it could save a lot of energy.
It actually started even before Chiat; George Nelson proposed the Action Office, where different furniture served different functions, in the early sixties. The problem was the wired phone, that is what tied everyone down. Now, with cellphones, blackberries and ubiquitous high speed internet, everything has changed, and as was predicted in the Harvard Business Review in 1985, Your office is where you are.
The office systems have evolved to make it a lot more comfortable.
Alexandra Shimo of The Globe and Mail notes that IBM Canada is currently switching to the hotelling model for all of its 19,000 Canadian employees. At the moment, 40 per cent of its work force is mobile, while the rest have set desks. The company is implementing the change to "capitalize on their office real estate" says Jim Brodie, program manager for IBM's national mobility program. Many IBM employees already work from home and communicate with their bosses virtually, so they don't need a permanent desk, he adds. Unlike some other firms, IBM allows its "hoteliers" to work from home. "This is a cultural change for IBM," Mr. Brodie says. "A place where you are settled is going out the window."
She suggests that "hotelling is becoming more common across a number of different sectors, including in call centres, real-estate firms, consulting and technology companies.
Some employees don't mind the loss of structure. Lindsay Freeman, a KPMG senior accountant, says she enjoys the sense of transience. Since hoteliers have to clean their desks at the end of each workday, she finds it makes her more organized."
It is also very green- few people commuting, less space being built, heated and cooled. Welcome back, hot-desk; all is forgiven.
It doesn't have to be like this. ::Globe and Mail,
For more on Chiat-Day, see ::Wired and ::An Inquisitive Focus on the Virtual Office
There are a lot of work alternatives coming to life, or being resurrected these days. I run a coworking office in Seattle and have been keeping a keen eye on all the developments.
Welcome to my life. Choosing to be a freelancer affords one the luxury of being a virtual nomad all the time.
We tried something like this where I work with limited results. Productivity went down, support costs for IT jumped, and people were angry because we were in Minneapolis and they couldn't connect to the coffee shop in Duluth on their wireless and we were supposed to figure it all out on the phone.
The biggest problem is that the knowledge needed to be a mobile employee is ignored. People just assume that wireless is wireless. There is no concept of security or anything. You need to be knowledgable if you want to do this.
You need to know was your power cord looks like, your mouse cable looks like, and simple terms like 'log on', 'connected', and 'reboot'. "Doo-hicky", 'That thing', and 'I did that' are not helpful.
Some of our telecommuters live way out in BFE... spelled 75 miles from any major city or communications hub and they don't understand why their connectios are so slow, so they go with a cell-card, or satellite(gah!).
I have one doctor that downloads files while driving using a laptop and cell-phone-modem(he claims to start the download when he starts the car) and then cannot understand why it dies driving through a tunnel...
If you want to do this, especially as a company, you need to know what to train your people on to make it work or you'll just collect bills that are big enough to be Williams in IT support costs.
-Lego
it's amazing how much technology can alter our lives.