By Heather L.E McKay
What is Hotdesking: this is a trend that was invented a couple decades ago, when businesses thought it would be really super fun to piss off autistic people. I’m kidding, that’s a joke – sort of!
Yes, hotdesking does upset quite a lot of us, and yes; it’s bad for many reasons – but it was invented more as a way to get people to interact with other employees and ‘become more flexible’. And that’s why I say it’s discriminatory and bad for autistics – because we are the ones that most of society see as ‘not being flexible’ or of ‘not having flexible thinking’. But we don’t need to change and that’s the problem with hotdesking, it doesn’t respect those differences and those needs for predictability, stability or routine and safety.
Hotdesking is where a company sets up all the desks in an office exactly the same (all desks look the same, so that it doesn’t matter which you sit at). In my opinion it uses sheep herding mentality.
The desks are set up as small impersonal spaces that anyone is allowed to use – you don’t get a set place to sit, or your own private area, and you aren’t allowed to personalise it. You have to sit at any desk that is available, and you are not allowed to store anything in it or on it…. It must be a sterile boring environment in which you leave the same way you found it.
You sit down on a generic chair, at a generic desk ;they are usually smaller than other organisational desks – that are usually bigger to accommodate storing personal things. These new generic desks are usually smaller but able to be standing desks as well. You will find the same things; perhaps two screens, a keyboard and a mouse – that you hook up to your personal laptop. You take your laptop with you – so you are able to do your work at any desk in the office.
You will find you need to re-adjust everything. The chair will be too high, or too low, leaning too far forwards, or too far backwards. The desk will be too high or too low. The chair won’t be comfortable because it hasn’t moulded to your spine and to your way of sitting – which is terrible for people with EDS, mobility issues or any other disability that can’t move around enough to even adjust the desk and tools available to you.
You will then adjust the screens to the right height/ angle etc – IF YOU ARE ABLE!!! You will spend half the morning just trying to get comfortable and settled. You may have a little RSD as well – due to the fact that you have accidentally displaced someone who had sat there yesterday and was really wanting to sit there today – but you have already re-adjusted half the things – so they gave you an exasperated look on their way to find a new desk – and now you’re spiralling.
You waste half the day everyday simply trying to get comfortable. Does it sound good so far? Maybe – if you realise that it also gives you the opportunity to sit in that nice place in the office – where it’s not too cold, not too hot, not too much noise, near enough to the toilets and kitchen and the exit… and hopefully not near that person you can’t stand. Or maybe that person who bullies you is following you around the office each day and you struggle to get away from them no matter where you sit.
BUT… what if everyone else has realised the same thing and taken that perfect spot you finally found? Where do you sit now? How do you deal with everyday /everything / everyone changes? You can’t find anyone – because no one ever sits where you can find them. Maybe you have face blindness and hotdesking is simply the MOST discriminatory invention you’ve ever come across for your disability.
When you’re a new person to the business, how do you get to know everyone and what they do?
Hotdesking is supposed to, in theory, get people to talk to each other – but it’s honestly ridiculous to me. You sit next to a different person everyday – you only ever get to know anyone superficially. If you’re an introvert and find talking to strangers terrifying, painful or really uncomfortable; this will not suit you. This system might be great for some NT people, or for some extroverts – but is really quite disabling for a lot of ND people who hate small talk and superficialness, or don’t like having to mask every single day in a new way to a new person. This causes us to have to code-switch all day everyday in new ways – because each new person we meet and sit next to, requires us to figure out their preferences for communication etc. It’s exhausting.
So, we don’t just only spend all morning trying to get comfortable at a new desk, we also have to get comfortable with a change of people sitting near or around us. It’s like forgetting how to swim every night when you go to sleep, and then every single morning, someone comes to you and throws you in the ocean and expects you to ‘learn’ on the spot and not drown.
When I sit in the same space everyday – I get used to the same voices, same smells, same noises – I become ABLE to tune them out (sometimes, sometimes not). I know that if I want to get something done – I can’t sit next to Carol who wears perfume/ or cologne, or Jack who has a loud booming voice, or Sandy who likes to chit chat all day long. With Hotdesking – if I’m the first to arrive at work, I can find the perfect desk – but I can’t control who sits near me as the turn up later in the day. With traditional desks – (where the employer with your input finds the perfect space for you) – you don’t have that fear and anxiety about whether you will be able to work each day. Or what will trigger you today or the next.
When I start a new job, I learn people’s names, faces and roles by learning where they sit – specifically; what their role is, where they are located and where I can find them if I need help, or who they sit with, eg: it helps me to learn that they sit with all the accountants – so therefore I remember they are “Fred an accountant”, or they sit in the HR department – therefore they are “Sally from HR” etc etc. It helps me with remembering people, places, spaces and roles. It’s a memory technique that served me well as a teacher to learn all the students names. I’d learn which name went with each seat – until I knew the faces, needs, abilities and personalities of each student… I could then ‘name’ them by sight in different contexts and places (eg: at the supermarket on the weekend, or when they change classes and go to art or music lessons where they sit in a different place). But I don’t understand how hotdesking helps new employees learn their co-workers names, faces and roles? It’s too random for me – how do you learn all this new information when starting out in a new job?
The clinical aspect of hotdesking:
Because you must take all of your belongings with you at the end of the day – so someone else can sit in that space tomorrow – you can’t personalise your space or make it comfortable, or even leave some work behind. Work that you need to do tomorrow in that space – so that you can quickly get stuck into the work in the morning. You can’t even do what Homer Simpson did in an early episode of the TV show The Simpsons. Homer decorated his workspace so he could stand to be there – to feel like he wasn’t a faceless drone or a cog in a wheel – depressed and herded with the rest of the faceless sheep. He decorated his space with pictures of his youngest child (Maggie) to brighten his day and cheer himself up. And it works – personalising your space has been proven to improve mental health. It can also help you to associate good feelings with work, and to make you feel like a more permanent employee.
Hotdesking can make you feel temporary in your role, because you don’t have a permanent space of your own.
Another point is that many disabled people need to take certain things with them.
When you hotdesk- it forces you to have to take everything you need with you, everywhere you go, every single day. That’s a lot of things to cart around and be forced to move – some of us feel like we need a removalist van every time we move desks, and hotdesking requires you to do it daily. Afterall, some of us need many different disability tools and accommodation items; incontinence products, headphones, special chairs (wheelchairs, ergonomic chairs, or yoga balls etc) or aides (crutches, wheelie walkers, guide dogs, heaters, food, special water bottles that alarm and remind us to drink water, medications, etc etc etc). If we don’t have a car or can’t drive; this disables us even further.
Some disabled people can use a car to store all the things they need to become more able – if they don’t have a desk that they can store these things in. If you don’t drive or don’t have a car – where do you store the things you need that’s close enough to your place of work that you can access them? Even if you do have car – it won’t be easily accessible – you’d have to go out to your car to get the things you need each and every day – all day long. This also impacts your effectiveness to get things done and ability to actually function and work.
Some workplaces supply a locker. Is it close enough for you to access quickly? Is it big enough to store what you need? Is the lock broken? Do you have to share it with some one else? Do you feel safe leaving things in it? Do you still have to cart everything from the locker to your ‘hotdesk’ daily – and back again at the end of the day? How much does that disable you? How much does that affect your spoons and energy everyday?
This list of things we need as disabled people can seem never ending. And when we are working in spaces that don’t recognise that need – we become more disabled – it literally disables us.
But if we are given the right spaces and things we need, we become more able. Hotdesking isn’t just bad because it inconveniences some – it’s bad because it favours abled people over disabled people – which is the definition of discrimination.
Other things that make hotdesking difficult:
· Some teams don’t hotdesk and set up where they want (permanently -defeating the purpose of hotdesking in the first place). Sometimes they set up in a space that would be better suited to moving groups of people, or individuals, or to people with disabilities. I know the engineering or architecture departments of many places are usually the first to give up hotdesking (and I hate to be stereotypical – but I believe it’s first and foremost because so many engineers are autistic, or have autistic traits, but I’m biased because most of my autistic family are engineers and all hate hotdesking) but also because they need space and bigger desks to lay out printed plans of designs and plans, and they need to refer to those plans day in and day out for sometimes months. So hotdesking is literally the worst thing for those departments.
Hotdesking simply doesn’t work for individuals or teams that need to have a big desk and lots of space to spread out and have those things laid out to constantly refer to and see all day long – it would take them hours each day to set it up again in a new space. It’s not efficient or effective, or logical to hotdesk.
· Hotdesking can force people to work from home – so they can have what they need and get work done quickly and easily. Which is great, but it also can cause isolation for some introverts who aren’t able to connect to people randomly or superficially, over the internet or through code-switching, or through ‘less contact’… some ND people are disabled by the double empathy problem and find communication easier in person – but others find it easier via text or email. When we hotdesk – it adds another element of confusion or anxiety that can make our masking or code-switching harder to do.
· Hotdesking without a way to know if someone is in the office on a certain day can be unsafe. Eg: someone may have had an accident on the way to work – but if co-workers don’t know where they are sitting that day – or if they’re even in the office – no one may find out about the accident or be able to help till too late.
And many many more issues for individuals or for groups or teams. What are the Pros and Cons that you have identified for this type of company policy?
If you’ve worked in this type of environment, what did you think? What was good, what was bad? What hindered you from doing your job? What helped? Did the workplace eventually return to traditional workplace setups – where people have assigned seats? Or does it work in certain spaces? Let me know in the comments, I’d love to hear others experiences of toxic and good work environments that have found different ways of working.