Hot desking vs desk booking: why your staff quietly hate both
If you ask people what they think of hot desking, you’ll hear about the morning hunt for a desk, the monitor that’s set up for someone else and the drawer full of someone else’s things. Ask about desk booking and the complaints change: desks booked and never used, colleagues who can’t sit together, and an app that becomes another job to manage.
Both were meant to solve the same problem. Most offices have far more desks than they use. The trouble is that each approach only treats a symptom, and staff notice.
The problem both are trying to solve
Squaredot has measured how offices are actually used for more than 20 years, across 80 offices and feedback from over 30,000 people. One finding has barely moved: desks sit empty for most of the week.
Before the pandemic, average desk use in our studies was around 50%, with an average peak of 66%. Since 2022 it has dropped to 42%, with an average peak of 58%.
So if the question is “does everyone need a desk?”, the data says no. But the answer is more complicated than taking desks away, and that’s where both hot desking and desk booking go wrong.
Why hot desking frustrates people
Hot desking assumes everyone works the same way and can sit anywhere. In reality, the people in your office have very different patterns. Our studies group them into profiles:
Fixed desk workers spend around 90% of their time at a desk.
Semi-mobile workers spend around 65% at a desk and move around the office for the rest.
Mobile workers spend around 30% at a desk and 40% in external locations.
Satellite workers spend around 10% at a desk and 80% elsewhere.
Remote workers are rarely in at all.
Before COVID, our average split was 91% office-based staff, 6% mobile and 3% remote. Post-pandemic, we found 32% office-based, 42% mobile and 26% remote.
Hot desking treats all of these people the same. The person who’s in five days a week loses a settled place to work, and the person who’s in once a fortnight still has to compete for a desk on the busiest day.
Why desk booking frustrates people too
Desk booking adds structure, but it rarely changes the layout. It just puts a system in front of the same rows of desks.
The result can be striking. In one government agency we worked with, desks took up 53% of the building, but desk bookings peaked at just 16%. Nearly half the building was heavily underused, and the booking system couldn’t fix that.
Booking also struggles with peaks. Most hybrid offices fill up Tuesday to Thursday and empty out on Mondays and Fridays. In one study, a Thursday lunchtime peak of 66% fell to just 6.6% by Friday afternoon. Book for the average and the busy days overflow. Plan for the busy days and the quiet days look deserted.
What works instead
The answer isn’t hot desking or desk booking. It’s giving people the right kind of space for the work they actually come in to do.
Start with the data. Measure both the average and the peak. Only by looking at both can you plan for the busy days without wasting space on the quiet ones.
Match desks to the people who need them. Desks suit people who are in four or five days a week. They can be assigned or bookable. Mobile, satellite and remote workers are often better served by shared touchdown positions, such as large tables without the divisions of a bench desk system. They take less space per person (around 4.5 m² compared with 5.5 m² for a desk) and double as somewhere to meet.
Give people somewhere else to go. When we ask people what they want from the office, the top answers aren’t desks. 71% want spaces for informal meetings, 69% want meeting pods for Teams and phone calls, 68% want collaborative and team spaces, and 62% want break-out spaces. As one stakeholder put it: “We could make a rule stating that if 50% of your day is in meetings then please don’t book a desk. All we need is somewhere to touchdown in between.”
What this looked like at Manchester Airport Group
On a typical floor at Manchester Airport Group, average desk use was just 40%. There were 203 desks for 203 people, and typically 122 of them were empty.
We replaced them with 96 desks, 40 flexible touchdown positions and a range of other settings, still supporting all 203 people. In the client’s words: “We’ve gone through 30 years of office development in 9 months.”
The bottom line
Hot desking and desk booking are both tools, not strategies. On their own, they ask people to fit around a layout that was designed for a different way of working. Get the mix of settings right first, and the booking rules become far simpler, and far less resented.
Read the full research
This blog draws on The Dynamic Workplace, Squaredot’s report based on 10 years of workplace data across UK businesses, 80 offices and more than 30,000 people.
