Desk set

When I was growing up, a popular gift to give your father was something called a “desk set”. The cheeseball, Woolworth’s versions I could afford were made up of a blotter, a matching pencil cup, and a pen holder that contained a cheap and smearing pen that after spitting out a series of ink globs would blessedly dry up. I have no idea what my father did with the desk sets he acquired over the years.

Needless to say, I always wanted one and at one point either got one for a gift or saved up to make a purchase for myself.

I’m sure that there were really elegant and pricey desk sets, with leather blotter-paper holders and Cross pens, but I never saw one.

(The distaff equivalent was a “vanity set”, a cheap comb, brush, and mirror with some kind of fake fancy embossed design on it. Again, I’m sure there were nice ones – for the folks in Downton Abbey and their peers - but any one I purchased for my mother or received as a gift was most decidedly a Woolworth’s version.)

Anyway, I haven’t thought of desk sets in years.

While I do sit at a desk – not really a desk: it’s a cherry wood trestle table – I don’t use a blotter or a leatherette penholder. But I do have stuff on my desk. Mugs the do hold pens and pencils. A box. A vase. A basket. (Let’s ignore the stacks of papers for now.)

My office has a calendar, a few framed pictures, a decorative plate that had been my mother’s, and the kindergarten pictures of me and my husband. (Aww….)

When I worked in an office, I always had a few personal items around. I wasn’t much for pictures, but I always had mugs, a plant, a calendar, a framed New Yorker cartoon. In 2003, after the Red Sox blew it, I printed out Boston Globe columnist Marty Nolan’s famous words, “"The Red Sox killed my father, and now they're coming after me” and posted it on my office door.

Everyone personalized their office to some extent. And I’m guessing they still do. Unless they’re doing office “hoteling” or “hot desking.”

Every day, they may wind up in a new location, with only the possessions they can carry to sustain them. At the end of each day, all trace of their personality is erased, in the way that the Soviet Union removed pictures of Leon Trotsky from the historical record. It is hard to think of a clearer indication that the individual worker is being treated as an anonymous drone. (Source: The Economist)

Hoteling and hotdesking are variations on a theme. With hoteling, you can make a reservation for a desk; with hotdesking you’re in a daily scramble for a place to call home work.

At one leading financial institution, any employee who accidentally leaves a possession on their desk overnight must try to retrieve it from Lost Property in the morning. That makes the end of each working day feel like the last frenetic minutes before you leave the house for a holiday, frantically checking that you haven’t left anything behind.

The impetus behind such arrangements is, natch, cost savings. Especially when so many folks work from home at least part of the time, and with so many road warriors out there, it really doesn’t make sense to tie up a full time office for someone who’s seldom there. Still, to make it the rule for even those who are always in the office is a step that’s way too far.

I worked for a couple of years for a company that was an agglomeration of small companies. I worked in HQ, where all of the senior execs had window offices, even though 90% of them didn’t work at HQ and were only there a couple of days a quarter. Most of the possessors of these offices locked them, so they weren’t available for small meetings, private or conference calls (the rest of us were in cubicles), or a grouse-fest with a colleague. The only women senior exec, however, left hers open and told a group of us that we could use it whenever we wanted.

Of course, hoteling wouldn’t have worked, given that the execs were all at HQ for the same couple of days each quarter. But what a waste of office space to not make these communal property when no one was occupying them. Not to mention that when the execs were in town, they were perpetually in meetings and used those precious locked window offices about 10% of their day.

Most of those offices weren’t personalized, by the way. Just selfishly hoarded.

Anyway, not having a dedicated office may be a cost saver, but studies show that it cuts down on productivity and hinders morale. And for hotdeskers who have to participate in an Oklahoma Land Rush on a daily basis, it can be a total time-waters.

A survey of British workers, published in June, found that those in a hot-desking office took an average of 18 minutes to find a seat. That translates into 66 wasted hours a year.

I’m always a bit skeptical of these workplace surveys, but having employees spend their first minutes at work scrambling around for a place to plop their laptop, well…

Then there’s this:

It is hard to see how anyone will be well-motivated by such an arrangement. If companies want employees to have bright ideas, it helps if they feel comfortable at their desks. And people are likely to feel most comfortable in familiar surroundings.

Is it worth even mentioning that “hot-desking is usually linked to another design feature: the open-plan office.”

I’m not going there, other to say that all the touted benefits of open-plan office have been largely debunked.

There are more and more freelancers out there. Internships (even if they’re paid) are gaining, not just for students but for recent grads. Many jobs are part-time – sometimes because the worker wants it that way, sometimes because the company does. So the proportion of workers who aren’t full-time and permanent has declined during my work life. So everyone’s not going to get a desk of their own. But at least let some of the people have a workplace that grounds them.

At this point in that work life, I’m delighted to be a very occasional freelancing part-timer. But during my “real” career I wanted to be at work. And whether it was a private office with a window, or a miserable little cubicle, I wanted to know that on Friday afternoon, Frank would swing by my office for a bull session. That on Monday, I would always have tea with Joan. That I could count on John, in the cubicle next door, to repeatedly tell the same boring story over and over and over. And that wherever I was calling home away from home, I knew that my shoes, lip balm and teabags would be in the drawers. And that my mug and New Yorker cartoon would be on the desk top. That was all the desk set I needed, but I wanted it there.