Hot desks killed the office - not COVID

London based media and government is telling us we should all give up the new quality of life benefits we’ve discovered this year. We should return to mass commuting to London just to keep their favourite local shops open. They’ve got some nerve haven’t they?

Their argument is that COVID is a once in a century disaster and we shouldn't let it destroy the highly successful office culture that was working so well. I would disagree - selfish egotistical management from business and government had been killing the office for a long time.

We all know the vital need for every important business in the western world to have impressive offices in central London.

But what are managers to do when the business has shiny impressive offices but not enough desk space for the workers? Hot Desks! This is when you have no desk, and you have to work at a spare desk, assuming you can find one. Lousy for your concentration, lousy for your sense of belonging, and lousy for your professional confidence. It made co-workers compete for space as soon as they walked through the door in the morning and exposed the power dynamics in every office on a day to day basis.

Hot desks took away the home from home you had at the cosy place of work and just gave you a seat that may as well have been in a cafe. It instantly undermined the whole point of the office, because without face to face interaction within teams the office is just a cafe full of strangers. and once decent internet is everywhere, in every public space, the hot desk office is a joke. 

Hot desks not only took away the home you had at work, but they replaced it with a disruptive competitive experience which insensitivised “flexible working”, which we came to know as the 5am start which destroyed any life you might have had outside the office mid week. 

Hot desks started as a workable if irritating idea about a decade ago  -but as office space got more and more tight in central London the more the working conditions seemed to resemble that of battery chickens. At one job I shared a cubical for one with three others. 

Hot desks had for me one final farcial phase in the summer of 2019. After a high profile office move to the square mile we were told to;

• Commute into the office through the London's Venusian atmosphere for hours costing a fortune five days a week in a suit.
• If you find a spare  desk take it. If there are no spare desks to sit at you are allowed to travel back and work from home and work from there. 

After a month of early starts this changed to - 

• If a member of <any>  team needs the desk that you managed to find at 7am  you are allowed to travel back and work from home.

There are HR people and management staff everywhere moaning about the impossibility of allowing the average office person to work from home. The reality is home working has been an option for office workers for decades - but just for the managerial class. This is another factor which has eroded the office working environment, seeing essential management functions disappear because decision makers elevate themselves into a position senior enough to allow them to ‘work’ (aka babysit) from the Cotswolds. 

In the IT industry we frequently sat in offices packed like sardines. These were usually filled with expensive coders that spent all day on headphones craving solitude and begging for peace to allow them to concentrate. Meanwhile the day to day mangers who should have been running the office had checked themselves out to stay home and “keep an eye on Little Timmys cold”. 

If you are a shareholder in a company being told that it needs expensive London offices and just can’t implement working from home measures for the whole workforce - tell them to just roll out the same working from home procedure they’ve provided for senior management, for every company, since the advent of email.

If you are an office worker being pressured into returning to the office by esteemed guardians of your welfare like Boris Johnson, The Sun or your Office Manager console yourself with the following:

"Offices" as they are now, will only last as long as the current rental lease on the building. The decisions on your working location won't be made by office managers whose hours have been 10-4pm 3 days a week for years, they will be made based on the cost of extremely expensive real estate decisions which have now been revealed as a redundant corporate ego trip. Most office leases are about two years - so expect decisions to be made long before those leases are up.

And London? Does the world administrative centre of tax havens and dirty money need sympathy for losing footfall in the effects of COVID? 

Don’t make me laugh. I love you London but you’ve made millions of people trudge like rats through filthy dangerous tube stations and roads for decades at their own expense, while we had to compete for space with millions of tourists (have you ever tried working near Oxford Circus?). 

Meanwhile, the London based media has promoted the place as the centre of all things for so long that the rest of England looks like a dried up husk.

Worry about the future of working in London? 

Cry me a river