Hot-Desking Is a Good Way to Lose Your Best Staff
Employees’ demands for flexible working will include spacious offices. Given the relative savings, slashing floor space is a false economy.
Going to the office shouldn’t be a game of musical chairs.
Photographer: Alexander Tamargo/Getty Images
Corporate bean counters must be tempted to slash office space as work-from-home advice resumes where Covid cases are surging. But succumbing will mean consequences for recruitment. It’s easy to forget that offices are a retention tool, and will remain so.
Everyone knows employers have incentives to pull people back to their desks. Offices facilitate free-flowing ideas and business leads, cultural cohesion and the seamless transfer of savoir-faire from senior employees to their juniors. And many employees want to return. Anecdotally, recent brief spells in semi-empty buildings have given a boost to some financial workers for any number of reasons: The clearer separation of professional obligations from personal life, the easing of pressure on relationships unaccustomed to one or both partners homeworking 24/7.