Office Hoteling

What is office hoteling? Why is the practice spreading? What are the unintended consequences of its usage?

Office hoteling changes the traditional model for how office space is used. Rather than assign permanent office space to each employee, hoteling is a system for assigning just-in-time temporary office space to employees. The hoteling systems I’ve experienced allowed me to reserve a small cubicle somewhere in the office for a single day. These systems ran on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Why is the practice spreading? The financial side of organizations love it. Hoteling minimizes the square footage of the office. The lower the square footage of an office —the lower the cost to lease the space and the lower the business taxes, which are partially based on square footage.

What are the unintended consequences of this practice? There is less employee interaction and the quality of the interaction is poorer. More employees choose to work from home rather than having to schlep their stuff to the office each day and work in a tiny cube. This change results in lower transportation costs for employees. But it also results in conference calls becoming the primary means of interaction rather than face-to-face interaction.

The winners with hoteling are visitors to the office. When the office space was permanently assigned to employees, they might not be able to find a place in the office to work. With hoteling, my experience is there is always space available.

The losers are management but they don’t notice the loss for months or years. In my experience, management retains their permanently assigned offices despite the introduction of hoteling. They don’t  immediately notice the impact of hoteling; for instance, they fail to notice that employees aren’t stopping by their office to alert them about something they’ve seen or heard.

If your organization is contemplating hoteling, I suggest moving managers from their offices to permanent cubicle space. They will benefit from experiencing the change, which will enable them to take actions to fix problems, rather than merely observing the change to hoteling. Furthermore, I suggest converting all management offices to meeting rooms so more private space is available for employees to meet. Hoteling works best, in my opinion, when abundant areas of private space are available for people to use for meetings. If more meetings are happening in the office, more people will come to the office and that will foster productive, unintended face-to-face interactions.

I believe that face-to-face interaction, when possible, is the most powerful form of interaction. If an organization discourages the employees who live in the same area from going to the office through the practice of hoteling, then it should be prepared to suffer the consequences. The organization will enjoy less expensive office space and suffer through poorer communication and thus lower productivity.

Don’t short circuit the ability of employees to interact through the practice of hoteling. If you must hotel because of a financial crisis, increase the amount of your office’s private meeting space to facilitate face-to-face interaction.

Tagged as: face-to-face, hoteling, losers, productivity, quality, unintended consequence, winners