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WotD: Hot-desking
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Back in the 1960s, the concept of the office cubicle was invented.
It was intended to simultaneously make offices more open and breezier while giving workers a sense of privacy.
The typical Japanese office follows an open plan, with everyone sitting side by side at rows of desks in one huge room.
Now there’s a new style in town – hot-desking.
Hot-desking is an office concept in which no one has a dedicated desk. Workers can choose to sit wherever they want.
Well, it’s not so new overseas, but it’s only now becoming popular in Japan.
Japanese refer to the system as ‘free-address,’ but it’s the same thing.
Company employees do not have assigned desks; they can take whatever desk is available on any given day.
The origin of the term hot-desking is interesting.
It’s similar to a term for navy vessels, especially submarines, called hot-racking.
On a submarine, there are typically fewer beds than there are submariners.
Crew members share a bed or rack, as the navy calls them.
When one crew member’s shift ends, another’s shift begins.
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Therefore, it’s common for a person to get into a rack immediately after another person vacates it.
The bed is still warm, and thus, the term hot-racking came about.
Hot-desking is a way for companies to have smaller offices and reduce operating costs.
An office may have 100 workers, but at any one time, there are some out of the office, working at home, on vacation etc.
This means the company does not need as many desks as they have employees.
Like the racks on a submarine, the desks are shared among various employees.
Also, if a company has gone digital, there is no need to store paperwork at a desk.
Everything is in the cloud.
That’s hot-desking.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least an 8th-grade education (age 13 – 14).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 66.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.