Reflections

As mobility and seamless communications become part of our every day work lives, we will begin to notice that there are a lot of empty cubes and offices in our office buildings. While I was working at Accenture many years ago, they implemented a system by which we would simply reserve space for those days that we were going to be in the office. They even had mobile file cabinets, that you could lock, and that would show up in your space when you were in the office. For a company filled with consultants in client-facing roles, it was a brilliant move, reducing the office space requirements dramatically while increasing satisfaction as people felt like they had a little more freedom.

As other companies begin to see that the office spaces that take up expensive real-estate are not being used a certain percentage of the time because their workers are now mobile (and more effective, of course) and can still easily be reached, they will begin to realize that the hotelling, or hotspacing option is one that could work for a subset of the workforces.

Hotelling, also called hotspacing, allows what I describe above: workers go through a reservation system to hold office space for the days they are going to be in the office. It’s easy to reserve the same space over many days, though you can’t leave anything in the shared space over night. You can, however, put things in your mobile file cabinet which will magically appear in whichever room you have reserved for the day.

I would expect this trend to only slowly lead to changes in large offices, though we could see further changes within smaller companies; many have already made this switch, or have eschewed offices altogether in favor of reduced overhead and increased worker freedom. There are also certainly instances when it won’t make sense for companies to make this change. For those groups that deal with physical documentation, or need to be present to interact with each other constantly throughout the day, the move to distributed workers might not make much sense. But for those groups or companies with a preponderance of technologically savvy information workers, there has likely already been a push towards increased freedom. It might, then, be time to make to move to hotspacing.

What do you need to do to make hotspacing effective?

1. Develop a simple system for people to reserve space and forward their phones to that space (doing this automatically can win extra points).
2. Make sure facilities staff is available to prepare these spaces at the beginning of the day, moving the traveling cabinets, docking stations, larger monitors (potentially available upon request), etc. to reserved spaces before the worker arrives.
3. Create some general guidelines, and some policies, so that people develop good habits in reserving spaces. These should include: no squatting rules, calling to cancel if you don’t need a reserved space, etc.
4. Smaller break-out spaces, and random outcroppings of comfortable chairs, should also be provided so workers can easily hold ad-hoc meetings without having to reserve full conference rooms. This would also provide space to workers who are only planning to be in the office for a few hours on a given day.
5. If it makes sense for teams to be within physical proximity at some point during the week, allow them to reserve blocks of space every week on specific days, or between specific hours on certain days.

The point here is providing flexibility. As it becomes increasingly easy to stay connected to the cloud, we have the opportunity to derive benefits from improvements in technology. Though the management challenges partially addressed in some of my other Information Worker of the Future articles will certainly be present as some companies change to hotspacing or hotelling, the potential gains are worth the experimentation.

Tags: Business and Technology, Management //