A permanent desk could be the next thing to burn on the recessionary pyre, Hassell’s Peter Black told Architecture & Design today. Corporations desperate to cut overheads and an increasingly mobile workforce may lead to a new trend in office architecture, Black said, with desk ‘zoning’ rather than ‘homing’ becoming the norm.
Studies show that a desk in a typical office is only occupied 70 per cent of the time, Black said, so corporations should provide 70 desks for 100 employees. “Even if you take a 15 per cent margin of error and provide desks for 85 per cent of the workforce, that’s still a real estate saving of 15 per cent, which is a big chunk of money,” Black said.
Standardisation would be key to the success of such spaces. Each desk would have to be the same so that staff don’t mind where they sit. The bonus is that a standard suite across an organisation would allow departments to overflow into adjacent zones and staff to be easily reassigned to other areas, thus slashing churn rates.
Hassell’s clients are “very interested” and one financial institution has commissioned the firm to research the idea and prototype it. If the project were to go ahead, it would be the first of its kind in Australia, Black said.
“This is something we’ll see happening within the next year,” Black said, “because it’s logical and appropriate for recessionary times. Corporations are looking at every way possible of reducing costs.”
Hassell’s plans are “beyond hotelling”, the long-time trend for accounting auditors to spend most of their time at client offices. Non-territorial workplaces are much more extensive and would include groups or divisions within the organisation that generally perform their work based in the head office. Laptops, phones and remote-access servers mean that many staff are not anchored to their desk.
