Our poll for this week found 60% of Community Care readers have had hot-desking introduced in their department. Does anyone have any tips on how to survive hot-desking?
Also our community editor has come up with this visual depiction of hot-desking:
Can anyone beat it?
Social work blogger Fighting Monsters recently posted her own views on this subject - after visiting a former employer's office and discovering that hot-desking is a way of life for some teams, where she reflects that 'inputting' has replaced social work.
In addition to creating your own visual representations, feel free to send in photos of your offices where hot-desking is the norm.
Surely the future is working from home on work network. Church halls for team meetings and manager getting allowance for domestics at her/his house for supervision. County hall will provide hot rooms not hot desks, should the above need modification.
Not good for team support/spirit but at least you won't be late for work.
Hello Kirsty
I mentioned this issue in a recent piece for Guardian Local Government
http://www.guardian.co.uk/local-government-network/2011/feb/07/munro-review-less-bureaucracy-more-social-work?INTCMP=SRCH
Best
Sue white
A good article by Sue White which rightly places hot-desking within its proper context, i.e., as a money-saving exercise. It's a shame the comments section was hijacked by a troll with their own agenda (as is usual in the Guardian unfortunately).
In my own authority hot-desking was sold to us (not that anyone actually bought into into it) as a way of increasing flexible working. In fact, Peter Mandelson would have been proud of the effort that was put into spinning these changes in a positive light. It was almost as if all those years where we had our own desks we had actually been getting it all wrong, that we had all been spoiled and that it really wasn't necessary. The idea of a practitioner having a professional space they could call their own seemed to become just a pipe dream espoused by those who remember the good old days, as if having a desk was somehow a luxury rather than a simple requirement.
Initially at least, laptops were provided but these soon dwindled and now the laptops have gone as they cost money to buy and maintain. So we're left with a situation where people walk in the front door and straight out the back door because there's no desk available. Some people will come in at 7 a.m. or leave at 7 p.m. just so they can get a workspace. I know that the senior managers would like us all to have our own desks but like most senior managers they don't fight it for long and in typical local authority style just fall back on pathologising problems like poor recording.
In my mind, hot-desking or so-called 'agile working' is one of the more pernicious changes in many social work teams across the country. You don't really appreciate what that professional space brings you until you lose it. For me, it's a practical place that provides me with the things I need to ensure casefiles and recording are up to date. It is a space where I can keep those books, articles and tools that help me to be more analytical and a more accountable practitioner. It's a simple thing really but can go a long way to telling me that I'm valued by my organisation. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, my own desk provides me with a reflective space that is always there whatever time I choose to come into work or decide to leave.
As for any survival tips, I would urge people who have started desk-sharing to build good relations with colleagues in other teams and other buildings (e.g. family centres) and don't be afraid to use those spaces to work when you can.
Like so many other things in these times we have to compromise on our expectations. Sometimes unbelieveably so.
Nihat said on another thread he would wear what his employer expected him to as he who pays the piper etc.
If we all take this approach we get what we deserve. Show a dog you are scared and he will become more omnipotent.
If the god money totally calls the tune we will end up cutting the lawn with nail scissors. We need working conditions minimum standards. Why is it not in the Human rights act.
Hot desking = avoidable stress. Employers duty of care?? Anyone fancy taking out a grievance?
"Not good for team support/spirit but at least you won't be late for work." ............hmmm, if I were to work from home I would be MORE likely to be late to work.....
Grinch puts very well the benefits of having one's own desk space. I hate hot-desking; it makes me feel 'less of' a practitioner.
Where I work, hotdesking would be made easier if the desktop was held on the workers drive on the server rather than the c drive of the computer...
It's a pain to have to resort and add links etc every time one moves desk...
I like the idea of flexible workspaces but it would require a fairly substantial move away from current work practice and environment. I can't help but feel hot desking is shoe horning half a smart idea into a rigid and somewhat systemicaly archaic format.
It would be a perfect opportunity to create an office space that actually feels creative, sofas, laptops and... I dunno... plants or something...
Of course this would need a little imagination and laptops which appear to be either too expensive and, well, generally unavailable.
But the new breed of laptops that are completely cloud based, including the OS, could turn out to be the very cheap and secure answer to at least part of the problem.
Who knows, maybe someone somewhere could google a little imagination with them too...
I'm a hot desker and although it took a while to adjust I now love it. The point about effective technological support is crucial however. The server must be the main storer of information and laptops with easiy accessibly docking stations which automaically update the server (and vice versa) are key.
By hot desking I have worked with a range of professionals and my knowledge has expanded significantly. I am more organised and have more control of my diary. I am delivering better outcomes and simply much prefer this new set up. Some of my colleagues however continue to struggle.
When I was growing up ... our family moved house every year ...so maybe I just don't get attached to places...?
Dear JessS
This is a very interesting post JessS - with a little bit of hope in it, which is good to see! In the article with the link above, - a few posts back - I argue that there must be ways to make these kinds of agile arrrangements better to work in and more condusive to safe practice - although I do feel they are not the optimal way to organise social work, and are often driven by a corporate initiative outside of social care. It would be really helpful I think to assisting organistions and professionals to think about redesign within the confines of what we have, if we were able to find a way to bring together ideas about how systems can be redesigned, so hearing from you about how your system works for you is very helpful. It'd also be good to know what is provided by your employer that you think is essential to this way of working and what adaptations you have made to the way you work - how you have made new relationships etc..
Best wishes
Sue White
Is the issue not more along the lines of:
If you do not need to return to your Office Base to discuss your visit / meeting etc. with your Supervisor / colleagues face-to-face then it does not matter where you record it?
The issue of delays in recording is better overcome by being able to go somewhere and record it as soon as possible after it took place - it is well researched that delay results in less information being retained (unless notes have been made beforehand).
It is all too easy to criticise 'hot desking' but fail to accept that there are real advantages also.
Whilst social work does not take place in a vacuum and it is often useful to have Supervisor / Peer Group interactions they can be accommodated alongside 'hot desking' surely.
'Jess S' above makes a valid point about meeting with others on their ground - but do they always do the same with us?
Sue /Jess. I can remember a union directive not to have anything to do with PCs as they would put people out of work. This Ned Ludd approach is understandable but proved to be flawed.
I do not put Hot desking in the same category as textiles and IT and fear your approach is an acceptence of mediocrity.
We had hot bedding in residential care and people quickly woke up to that, lets hope the same thing happens to hot desking. Whatever your arguments are you cannot deny it is another dilution of service.
Maybe your tinkering ideas will ultimately prove beneficial but now is not the time to tinker with social workers stability. Wait until we have a people first government.
I completely agree that we need to avoid dismissing change and innovation at any cost but do think we need to resist changes that are actually designed to meet the needs of local authorities and not the needs of families. Families need practitioners who are accessible, well supported, able to reflect on their practice and effectively use the strengths and resources of other members of their teams. They need practitioners to feel safe and secure in their practice and to have easy access to the tools, resources and advice that will help them to intervene safely in their lives. I doubt hot-desking is designed to do any of those things - it may allow some flexibility of practice so that recording tools are more accessible, but I continue to believe that good social work is best done in teams that deliver the emotional and professional support needed. Hot-desking is about making savings on office space however it is dressed up. While social work should make best use of the technologies available to us to meet out service user's needs, we have to insist that those needs are our first priority and not an after thought to practice.
Although I am not currently at the sharp end, my practice has always been supported by having a bookshelf of texts and materials I have collected over the years to use with families and by having a team of people around me that I can bounce ideas off and I know will challenge my practice in a safe way. I also need to have familiar things around me that make me feel safe, like photos of my kids, my favourite pen and the 'desk tidy' that my last team bought me. We can only practice safely in an emotionally challenging profession if we feel safe ourselves.
Bring back patch based teams and resist hot-desking unless it makes it easier for you to engage with and help service users!!
Shirack what Nihat actually said was that if you are beholden to an employer as an effective wage slave than don't delude yourself that you should have the autonomy to dress as you like to presreve your "individuality". Not quite the simplistic "who pays the piper" argument. As for hot desking it is another money saving exercise and worse, putting the financial burden of running an office on to the employee. Flexible working means nothing when you are paying the office utility bill and working alone with all of the obvious disadvantages and dangers that can come with it. It really makes me chuckle when social workers bleat on about their unique professional identities and than embrace a way of working that has no social value at all simply by dint of it being lone working or an imagined superior shared docking station.
Dear Shirack
I am no apologist for hot-desking and even without hotdesking the practice of locating teams in large industrial buildings, however shiny they may be, is definitely not where one would want to start with service design. It is a piece of 'tinkering' I would not have proposed and have never endorsed. However, I do think the profession needs to make the deficiencies of the system clear so that the worst effects can be ameliorated. My own view is that social workers need to be located in teams in the communities in which they work and we need to have a strong voice as a profession to say so. Meanwhile, there need to be steps taken urgently to make the working spaces better for the people in them and the children, families and adults who can no longer call into the local office. I'm afraid social workers stability has already been tinkered with and I'm not sure many like where they are, so another tinker is I'm afraid required for those who have already been subject to tinkering in a particular direction!
Kirsty McGregor: Our poll for this week found 60% of Community Care readers have had hot-desking introduced in their department. Does anyone have any tips on how to survive hot-desking? Also our community editor has come up with this visual depiction of hot-desking: Can anyone beat it?
leave person effects on every hot desk in the building. then all those desks are yours.
Hi Sue,
I think that it is hard to make the best case for having your own desk during a time of cutbacks and when you may spend as much as two or three days a week out of the office attending meetings, going on visits, etc. It can also be hard to argue that one's role is somehow more special than that of other professionals who are also having to live with hot-desking against their own wishes. I think there is an argument that those who are tasked with a statutory role of supporting and protecting the most vulnerable in society are a special case but that's a hard argument to win in a local authority. Consequently, it seems to me that it is only sensible that the impact of hot-desking is properly assessed and that creative ways are sought to ameliorate its worst effects. My experience is that it is often the practitioners and the frontline managers who are doing what they can to find these creative solutions and that senior managers prefer to avert their gaze, perhaps because to admit that there is a problem is to admit failure and they rarely do things like that. I really don't expect the upper echelons of the service to have all the answers but until they can accept that the majority of problems in social work do not begin and end with the individual practitioner then it seems we'll just have to keep on tinkering as best we can.
Just fill the office with bunk beds with a cusion to sit on and laptops- practical solution to lack of office space. Or if you're really brave, go and park your arse at the Chief Execs desk... im sure he/she will understand you're just hotdesking and he/she will skip on their merry way and abide by their own policy
The Local Authority I work in is shortly about to move all Council services into a big shiny new monstrosity that will offer 6 desks per 10 staff. Now whilst I like the idea of having my own space, I am also not adverse to change and recognise savings have to be made. However for hot-desking to truly work, there must be suitable alternatives to office based working; something my employer is not offering.
I work part time and spend a considerable amount of my time out of the office and often out of the borough, so I am happy to work from home, however my employer is not willing to provide the means to do so effectively. I have to email documents to my home email address (fraught with confidentiality issues), then email back to the office again; I cannot access my online diary, my email or the database. I therefore find I have to go to work to access the information necessary to do my job, taking up travelling time and in the future, taking up a valuable desk - not very cost effective really!
The flip side of this is the importance of frontline social workers, particularly those who are newly qualified, to have a base with their team, where they can access informal supervision on a day to day basis, support from colleagues on both work issues and the emotional impact of such a stressful job, and learn from observing how colleagues manage difficult cases. Banishing a newly qualified worker in a front line child protection post to a distant desk or even home working is only going to lead to poor practice, isolation and burn out. Surely a desk is little to ask to show that we value our staff.
Hot desking has been proven to fail as a cost saving initiative, some social workers spend precious time waiting for desks to become available, liaising with IT to get on the system and making numerous phone calls in an attempt to find other professionals who are also hot desking. I work from home a great deal and am much more productive, If I want to write a report until 11pm because I am in the flow of things I can, if I want to start at 6 am in the morning I can. At the same time, when I am working from home I tend to take proper tea breaks and half an hour for my lunch, when at work I carry on working whilst having my lunch or a tea break. Working from home, rather than struggling through the traffic, saves me 3 hours of valuable time each day. The only people that don't trust other professionals to do their duty are those that would shirk themselves if given the opportunity.
Do the people who decide to implement such a rubbish way of working, practice what they preach?
Do they Feck.
They also take up valuable car spaces, when they rarely come and go.
If royals were good people, they would abdicate.
When you come back from seeing a family where a father and daughter live as a married couple and their child has been demonstrating sexualised behavior in her primary school. You noticed a shotgun in the corner of the room and you have to decide what's to be done; you certainly don't want to be thinking, hope I can get a terminal to make some progress. You need immediate stability which is not provided by butterfly status.
If the directorate/members persist with this stupid idea,they are failing in their duty of care towards the workforce and the general public.
Redana, Good point to raise! I went to an event recently and a social worker told me that this had become a serious issue! (Afraid i can't recall which LA she was from) That it had initially been swept under the carpet with a 'oh.. they'll just need to manage' view. It soon became clear it was being raised constantly in supervisions and items becoming lost were delaying visits etc.
The solution is apparently going to be lockers..but there has been huge problems with identifying space for them, which has resulted in one team moving to another building! It has been a time consuming and expensive mistake
Shows the importance of proper consultation and paying attention to detail!
Its just poor planning I'm afraid. Organisations are all too often reluctant to invest in proper planning and project management to get things right in the first place. If you don't have someone with the right skills and experience taking the helm, it'll usually end up costing more than it needs to. (let alone the negative impact of dysfunctional planning!)
I get really concerned when I hear of situations where, rather than make people redundant, they are placed in other roles. Thats fine sometimes, but all too often we see posts being filled by individuals who don't have the rights skills and experience to really do it properly and deliver value for money.
(Just to confirm, by doing it properly I mean delivering outcomes for service users. Obviously meeting needs has to be a priority. Social Care is quite unique in that you can't get vfm if you don't meet needs properly. The problem is that those that hold the purse strings either don't know this or seem to have forgotten it!)
Rainbowarch: (Just to confirm, by doing it properly I mean delivering outcomes for service users. Obviously meeting needs has to be a priority. Social Care is quite unique in that you can't get vfm if you don't meet needs properly. The problem is that those that hold the purse strings either don't know this or seem to have forgotten it!)
thats pretty much how all businesses work to be fair
At the Local authority where I work two deputy team managers were actively involved in selling the idea of hot desking to their respective teams. However, as the reality of hotdesking began to hit them (they lost their desks too) they began to realise the folly of this way of working but instead of advocating for the rest of the team they convinced management that they should be allowed to have permanant desks. They now have permanant desks, once again, whilst the rest of us have to wonder around like lost sheep each time we walk into the office because all the computers are taken up. Talk about leadership by example.
The issue of the idea being acceptable if there were adequate alternative systems in place to support hot desking has been raised in another post. At my place of work if you type a document you have to e-mail it your self, just to be sure that you don't lose it, because documents are not always saved to your profile therefore the document might be unavailable when you move to a different work station. Laptops have also dried up.
Some of the die hards have come up with the cunning idea of coming to work half an hour early everyday because this almost guarantees them that they will sit at their regular desks.
Romeo... try telling that to the premiership!!!
As a locum worker, until quite recently, if asked to hot dest I would walk and find a team where I was actually valued as a professional, degree qualifed social worker should be. In my mind there is not much that says that workers are under valued to a greater extent than not providing the curtesy of their own desk and ICT equipment. Managers should show their metal and stand up for these basic rights for thier teams.
Tips for coping with hot desking. Win the lottery and leave work. Thats the best one. However in the real world, really dont know. Its a stupid idea which is insult to injury to people working in already difficult conditions. One person now has a cardboard box, that is a desk substitute, which goes to whatever desk...
It was on the news this morning, is apparantly as well as everything else very unhygenic and workers should be supplied with germ wipes. Husband said it made him feel sick watching it so glad I didnt see it.
We've had this implemented in our team recently, due to having more staff than available space for desks. It's crap- makes you feel so undervalued as members of staff.
As to where you keep your stuff like cup-a-soups Redana- in your work bag.
Since we've been doing this, it's made working very difficult- for example, on my desk I had various folders with useful information, forms, resources etc- not every desk has this, and if I end up on a different desk now, I can spend ages trying to find the bits I need which used to always be at hand. Likewise for things like a stapler or post-it note- basic working bits and pieces.
We have all raised the point that if we have to hot desk, can we not work at home to complete paperwork , as this is often most efficient due to the noise created in the office, and the lack of desks available, if and when everybody is in. The answer however is no, due to one staff member having previously abused this privilege and never showing her face in the office.
Interestingly, even when the team manager, ATM, service unit manager are not in the office, their desks cannot be used. And they don't hot-desk...
Sanctuary of a dedicated work station should be added to the HRA.
queenb: We've had this implemented in our team recently, due to having more staff than available space for desks. It's crap- makes you feel so undervalued as members of staff. As to where you keep your stuff like cup-a-soups Redana- in your work bag. Since we've been doing this, it's made working very difficult- for example, on my desk I had various folders with useful information, forms, resources etc- not every desk has this, and if I end up on a different desk now, I can spend ages trying to find the bits I need which used to always be at hand. Likewise for things like a stapler or post-it note- basic working bits and pieces. We have all raised the point that if we have to hot desk, can we not work at home to complete paperwork , as this is often most efficient due to the noise created in the office, and the lack of desks available, if and when everybody is in. The answer however is no, due to one staff member having previously abused this privilege and never showing her face in the office. Interestingly, even when the team manager, ATM, service unit manager are not in the office, their desks cannot be used. And they don't hot-desk...
With all my work stuff, I would have arms like an orangutan.
I don't consider working from home to be a privelege either. If I walk into an office and don't have a desk and chair, I would conisder it a basic need and I would be on my way back home.
I am very fortunate to work for an organisation that values it's employees and does not have hot desking. However, I talk to lots of social workers and managers where this is not the case and the real problems that are arising are affecting good social work.
Team managers are less available to their staff and service users/other agencies.....left wandering around the building waiting for somewhere to plug in. Supervision is inflexible as rooms have to be booked in advance and as we know, this is something that often has to be altered.
Managers cannot offer ad hoc support in the same way, as they could be in any team room in the building, require locating and are then in a public and densely populated space......which does not offer itself to one-to-one support.
There is a real loss of the feeling of being a team, which is so important in social work.....and the thing that can hold everyone together in the tough things that are day to day normality of the job.
Strategic? You bet. Divide and rule.
Lets face it Hot desking is an expedient measure dreamt up by the treasurers department.
There has not been one posting on here by someone responsible for the policy.
You can't tell me that none of them ever read this forum and if they don't that is a glaring omission on their behalf.
So, to the first gnome that does, get typing.
Shirack: Lets face it Hot desking is an expedient measure dreamt up by the treasurers department. There has not been one posting on here by someone responsible for the policy. You can't tell me that none of them ever read this forum and if they don't that is a glaring omission on their behalf. So, to the first gnome that does, get typing.
your p.a
redana: I don't consider working from home to be a privelege either. If I walk into an office and don't have a desk and chair, I would conisder it a basic need and I would be on my way back home.
I'd stay at work and sit waiting for a desk to be free, or ask my manager to find me one. My flat is not insured for business use, and I get no additional pay to cover the heating, lighting and internet charges I would incur in working at home. I have no intention of subsidising my employer by working at home. If they want me to work, they can provide me with the things I need to do the job.