Flex office with Clean desk
I spoke with a friend today who introduced me to a new concept I haven’t heard before: “Clean desk”. I suppose the idea is to have a flex-office solution where you have a bunch of workstations with laptop docks and then you grab an available one in the morning, and before you leave it should be 100% restored. I have some serious concerns with this approach.
By cleaning the workstation every single day, I suppose you will not find any personal artefacts of any kind anywhere. The office thus becomes very sterile. The human literally becomes a cog in a big machine, when all personal objects are removed. My spontaneous reaction is that I would feel very homeless. If there are shelves, they should be empty most of the time, if the system works. I have a 50-year-old sonometer in my office. I play with it a couple of times per year. It has no economic purpose, but there are few better display pieces at an acoustician’s workstation.
What about books, articles or hardware like calculators? In theory, most of these things can move into the digital realm today and are not required to eat up expensive space. But it cannot be denied that they influence the atmosphere. I like having acoustic books in a shelf nearby. If nothing else, just to look at.
The economic argument for a flex-office with “Clean desk” is obviously a no-brainer. Especially after work-from-home gained acceptance. But we are human beings, and it is not possible to quantify everything with a measurable parameter. The clean desk concept seems at first glance to be a very unnatural state. I think we have a need for a place we can call home. Another thing, if there is less emotional attachment to the physical location, there should also be less social attachment. They influence each other. If our environment tells us that we are a cog in a big machine, it is rational to treat your co-workers in the same way.
The only way I can see something remotely similar to “clean desk” work for me, would be if it was combined with a work from home office where I can “make it my own”. If I was only on site in the flex office 2 or max 3 days a week, maybe, just maybe I could stand it. But 40 hours a week? I go crazy just by thinking of it. I have worked in open-plan offices for about 6 years during an 8-year period. I got by, but I never liked it.
I have learned through decades of trial and error that I work best in a semi-chaotic environment. You may call it organized chaos. If I look around me in my office, there are tons and tons of artefacts, and I love it. On a scale with complete chaos on the left side and extreme order on the right side, I believe that I work best somewhere on the centre-left side. Of course, this boils down to personality and preference in the end, whether a clean desk-solution works or not. But to me, I cannot think of anything more extreme right on the order scale than a flex office with a clean desk principle. And extreme solutions are rarely the best approach. Also, there is a lot of talk going on that work from home is not desired and that organizations are becoming stricter in this regard. Now, if some workers are forced to return to a flex office with clean desk rules and mandatory 40-hour presence, I smell a possible conflict in expectations.