Interesting insight here by B-BBC contributor Alan;
“BBC loves the idea of a borderless Europe with free movement of people all living in harmony and peace, bringing diversity and sparking exciting, innovative new ideas off each other…..as long as you don’t want possessions or a ‘homeland’…or maybe even a home….wouldn’t it be more efficient to ‘hot house’ and merely temporarily live in any house…ready at an instant to move onto your next exciting project….no ownership, no house chains, no problems…and all forced, sorry ‘facilitated’, by the government…isn’t that reminiscent of a failed ideology that did seem to like borders so much they built a wall and killed you for trying to cross it?
After all it all works…or surely will work, at BBC Salford…..
‘Staff have been given lockers for their personal belongings, and then “hot desk” at different seats as required. But one luxury they are not allowed at their hot–desks is a waste–paper bin. The only bins are near the photocopiers and in the kitchen areas (which, of course, also have recycling hoppers and a receptacle for “lined single–use paper cups”). According to Salmon, the lack of a personal bin “makes people move round a bit more, collaborate a little bit more and get to know their colleagues, learn new things about different ways of working. If people become territorial and defensive about their own space, they tend to work in less efficient ways.”
In my experience hot desking works fine as long as you don’t actually do any real work. So great for the climate co-ordinators and Lesbian 5 a day organisers but utterly bl**dy useless if you are expected to design , create or build something. What often happens is that your staff who actually do something stop coming in and work from home (which is the only place they can do any work) or people say that desk is MY hot desk and that is your hot desk etc etc. Of course when it does all collapse the idiot consultants and managers behind it have usually moved on.
1327,
Well said ! It is one of the reasons I went self-employed and work from home. In 2 hours I can get the same work done as in a whole day in an office.
Offices, especially open plan, are very inefficient for the people who do the real work, but great for the majority of “hangers on”, so perfect for the BBC.
Oh, and I am free to log into B-BBC any time I want !!!
Grant I believe open plan offices were actually designed with the very purpose of preventing work. But if you are one of those people who don’t actually do anything except meetings they must be ideal. I work from home from time to time and like you find I do a normal days work in 2 hours.
Incidentally at work we have all just started using one of those online collaboration tools. I think its brilliant since people can ask me a question without bothering me with a phone call. Everything on the system is archived so I can look back to see who said they would do what and there is a status feature so I can instantly see who in my team is doing what. Whats really interesting is that the “hangers on” type as you accurately described them absolutely hate it 😀
1327,
So you have documentary evidence of who says what to whom ? The hangers on will hate that, catches them out when they lie. I rather wish I was in your office , sounds fun !
More like not-desking then?
what a load of bollox. these moonbats should be sat at their desk typing or doing what ever moonbats do at a moonbat HQ rather than standing ’round gabbing about moonbat ideology
sack ’em all
Not in the real world.
Wonder if I could commandeer that nice lime green “thought pod” on the floor below Peter Salmon!
I will be in Salford two weeks from now, so as a stakeholder: I would surely be allowed to “dream the vision” from my Joseph Strummer pod of passionate diversity and excellence. Just the three hours ought to do it Paxo!
Wonder if I could hire a Salford chappies rag and bone carthorse who might take said pod out to the scrummy Waitrose Extra there on the Quayside?
Got to be £145 worth eh?
This creative funding stream is copyright material, to stop the thieving magpies at the BBC from nicking my blue-skies conceptual frothy clouds of cleverness and virtues!
cj,
You are beginning to sound like “Birtspeak” from Private Eye. Be careful you are not kidnapped by Beeboids when in Salford. B-BBC may have to mount a rescue mission.
Hot desking is quite common in the public sector but not so much in the private sector. It’s often done to try to save on office space, working on the assumption that a set % of staff will not be at work or out on any one day. It’s a bit like the reverse of airlines who overbook flights working that 5% of customers never turn up.
At a client I visited the office staff had to wheel their files around in a moveable mini filing cabinet. What a joke!!
The only ones I can think of in the private sector are IBM and British Airways I’m not sure if they still use the system though. These schemes tend to appear in the Business press when they are first introduced but usually they gradually die out over the next year or so.
1327,
There is a firm of international lawyers with shiny new offices in Edinburgh. The receptionist couldn’t find the person I was looking for so I had to make contact by mobile phone. He was just about 30 yards away. Crazy !
It sounds much like communism : an idea that succeeds only in theory, but never in practice.
I am not a number – I am a free man…
That’s very interesting, Natsman and ……….. ?
Good point. By destroying the little people’s identity and sense of rootedness, Big Brother/Broadcaster/Brussels hopes to create a population of obedient slaves.
I bet BBC senior execs – members of Orwell’s “inner party”, so to speak – aren’t expected to “hot-desk”. Wonder if they can smoke, too?
They need their privacy for pocketing the brown envelopes from the hot-desk consultancy firm.
I assumed this was done to prevent them from spending too much time sitting in one spot posting on social media sites and editing Wikipedia entries..
Can’t they do that on their state-of-the-art licence fee funded Blackberrys ?
BBC-NUJ SPRING: LICENCEPAYERS’ WINTER.
“Unions to issue strike ballot after BBC rejects proposals.
NUJ and Bectu warn of strike action before Christmas after BBC rejects proposals on Delivering Quality First cuts.”
http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/unions-to-issue-strike-ballot-after-bbc-rejects-proposals/s2/a546498/
Good
Am I bovvered?
This brings back horrible memories to me. I worked in a company which introduced every new management fad starting with the attempts to copy Japanese work practices (just as the Japanese bubble popped, and they were entering their “lost decade”). Next came open plan (intended for all, but at the eleventh hour senior managers were exempted because their work needed “confidentiality”). Then we got hot desking which lead to such disarray, paranoia, and insecurity that senior management began sending us on self esteme and team building courses.
It sounds hilarious when set down in the above paragraph, but living through all of the crazy fads was a very stressful, and lead to massive inefficiencies and low productivity. Today, ten years since I removed myself for this insane environment, I still literally have nightmares dreaming I’m back in this workplace.
Little wonder the state our economy is in today when one realises the carnage wrought in industry by the parasitic managerial and consultant class to justify their pointless existences.
john,
Couldn’t agree more. One of the curses of this country is the low quality of the “managerial” class. I always felt it would be more productive to pay them to go and play golf rather than interfere with the people who really know what they are doing.
I understand that the Land Registry uses hot desking. Senior solicitors spending half an hour searching for a desk – really good use of tax payers’ money?
Caption for photo above:
‘Smug, spendthift Beeboids pay over the odds for large used Sellotape rolls.’
I worked for a short while for a telecoms/IT consultancy that had been a leader in its field, with many long-established customers. It was taken over by some “smart guys”.
It bought new offices even though the old ones were just fine. And introduced hot-desking.
It went belly-up vwithin 3 years. (I had left quite a bit earlier.)
Sounds like ‘Dilbert Does Salford’.
Difference being… this one is free:
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-08-02/
The Chiat/Day ad agency tried this experiment a few years ago, to much media applause. Wired magazine was one of the magazines that celebrated their bold new office experiment; in the end, they had to come back for a postmortem on why it didn’t work:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.02/chiat_pr.html