Why Employees Hate Hot-Desking

Hot-desking has some issues to work out.

With nearly half of the pre pandemic office population in some major U.S. cities working remotely on any given day, hot-desking—where employees don’t have assigned desks but grab an empty one on days they come into the office—seems like a cost-saving no-brainer. The Gensler Research Institute’s 2022 U.S. Workplace Survey found that 19% of the office workers who responded had unassigned workspaces, compared with 10% in 2020.

There’s just one problem: Many employees hate it. They complain about the nuisance of having to hunt for a workspace every day they’re in the office, not being able to find a station that suits their needs, and no longer having a permanent space that they can personalise. Collaboration is harder, they say, and they feel less connected to their colleagues.

“The recurring labor, anxiety and rootlessness associated with hot-desking were emotionally and physically exhausting,” Manju Adikesavan, a Ph.D. candidate in environmental psychology at the City University of New York Graduate Center, wrote in a recently published paper. “Carrying work materials from place to place in campus buildings that were my workplaces made me feel like a visitor rather than a member of an academic community.”

The good news for companies is that it doesn’t have to be this way. For one thing, some people appreciate the opportunity to use a variety of workspaces and to engage with a broader range of colleagues. And research reveals that there are ways to minimise, and even eliminate, the negatives of hot-desking.

“It’s important for leaders and workers to understand that this style of working is a mind-set, that if done right, it can offer a lot of freedom,” says Christhina Candido, an associate professor of environmental and sustainable design at the University of Melbourne and a researcher of high-performance workplaces.

Feeling adrift

Unfortunately, in the rush to cope with the rise of remote work, many companies have implemented hot-desking without a lot of thought.

On one level, the problems with hot-desking are logistical. A review of 23 papers that looked at hot-desking in the past two decades was published in March in the Journal of Environmental Psychology. It observed that employees often found it impossible to locate the right kind of workstation for their needs—a cubicle with two monitors, perhaps, or a quiet standing desk, or a huddle room with a whiteboard, says Jennifer Veitch, a principal research officer at the National Research Council of Canada’s Construction Research Centre and co-author of the study.

Issues like these are more than just a personal annoyance, the study showed. Hot-deskers also often had difficulty finding colleagues with whom they wanted to collaborate, Dr. Veitch says. And managers often found it more difficult to manage their team because they weren’t always close to one another.

“The evidence does not show that more collaboration takes place when you throw people together in a soup of random desks,” Dr. Veitch says. “Yes, a lot of conversation might happen, but not all of that is helpful to the organisation.”

The lack of control was also an issue for some employees in the study—the inability to control social interactions and to always find the quiet spaces that workers needed to concentrate, Dr. Veitch says.

Then there is the difficulty of adjusting your workspace to suit your preferences when you’re not rooted in a given spot. “The challenge is that we are territorial people,” says Dr. Candido. “We like to have our photos up, our coffee mug out.”

Some workers have sought to reclaim that sense of personal space—undermining the whole concept of hot-desking in the process. David Courpasson, a professor of sociology and ethnography at Emlyon Business School in Lyon, France, recently researched a Belgian organisation whose workers practiced what he calls “objectal resistance” by unofficially strategizing collective ways to preserve a sense of ownership of their hot desks.

“We observed that many had decided to reappropriate desks by leaving personal items out—photos, stickers, bags, even crumbs from previous lunches,” Dr. Courpasson says of the research he conducted with Laurent Taskin, a professor of human resources and organisation studies at the Louvain School of Management in Belgium. The resistance wasn’t organized, he says, but it was discussed among employees. “Dissatisfaction was shared here and there, in corridor chats or during lunches and breaks,” he says.

There was similar resistance higher in the ranks as well. “Even leaders weren’t following the strict guidelines of the flex office process,” Dr. Courpasson says. Eventually, some team leaders gave in and allowed a bit of personalisation of shared workspaces, an approach the entire organisation now tolerates, says the professor.

A longer workday

Some hot-deskers complain about the time wasted seeking a workspace that suits their needs, and say the ways they address that problem have altered their work schedules and eaten into their personal time.

In her 2022 study, Ms. Adikesavan, the Ph.D. candidate, looked at doctoral students hot-desking on a U.S. university campus. She found that they often arrived early or worked late, when their office was less crowded, to avoid competing with colleagues for suitable workspaces. They also often wound up working well outside of the usual 9-to-5 hours in subscription-based co-working spaces, for which they weren’t reimbursed, as they tried to meet research or presentation deadlines, Ms. Adikesavan says.

Eva Bergsten, who has a doctorate in environmental and occupational medicine and is a research specialist at the University of Gavlë in Sweden, found similar problems in a study she recently published of companies that switched to hot-desking. Some employees she surveyed said that setup time stole precious work hours. “Not being able to change workplaces within the office smoothly—due to the wrong computer equipment or when the technology did not work optimally—was also a concern and very annoying,” and it made employees’ in-office time less productive, she says.

As with other logistical issues, these problems aren’t just personal irritations. A 2019 study by Annu Haapakangas, a chief researcher at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, found that the difficulty of locating colleagues in a hot-desking office damaged communication and the formation of communities.

The move to hot-desking, Dr. Haapakangas says, “may also increase perceived work demands, at least in the short term,” because less contact with colleagues and a weaker sense of community could create stress that leads people to feel that their work is more demanding than they previously thought.

All these problems for workers can become serious issues for their employers. Dr. Candido says dissatisfied workers who don’t feel supported in the office are more likely to leave an organization, and the costs of replacing talent can outweigh the cost-saving measures that hot-desking can provide.

Dr. Veitch says that kind of cost calculation isn’t always clear to a company’s leaders. “There is definitely a challenge between the human-resources people and the facilities-management people,” she says. “They may both report to the CFO, but the CFO might not be seeing the relationship between the cost to the building and the cost to the people in it. You can wind up with a real recruitment and retention problem.”

Making it work

However, research also suggests that hot-desking doesn’t have to be a disaster for employees. Some companies have adapted the basic model of hot-desking in ways that employees find attractive.

“I have seen success stories,” says Dr. Veitch. “The introduction of ‘neighbourhoods’ where people still have to move around but they become ‘natives’ to a home base area, as opposed to a desk, can work.”

So-called hoteling is another common solution that takes some of the day-to-day stress out of having to find a workspace: Employees book a specific space ahead of time, making it more likely that they can find the properly equipped workstation they need and eliminating the wasted time of searching for a spot upon arrival at the office.

Research also has found benefits from providing a mix of spaces with different ambiences, including some with privacy. Leroy Gonsalves, an assistant professor of management and organisations at the Questrom School of Business at Boston University, studied a big company that went from assigned cubicles to a mix of workspaces—quiet areas with high partitions, noisier open cafes, spaces for small meetings and conference rooms, in addition to hot desks. Workers’ control over their interactions with each other substantially increased, which they liked, the study found.

“People in our survey said that, if they sit with their team, colleagues come up to them constantly,” Dr. Gonsalves says. “But in an environment with hot desks and other variations—a library, a cafe-like setting, little cubicles—you can be social or you can intentionally hide away.”

“It gave employees agency to avoid unwanted interruptions while balancing individual tasks with professional obligations,” he says. “Employees felt that their productivity was judged less by time spent being seen, and more on their work outputs in the new office space. It seemed to work well.”

Carlos Martinez, a principal in Gensler’s New York office and creative director of the architectural firm’s Northeast region, says that nearly every corporate project he is working on incorporates hoteling and a mix of workspaces similar to the variety at the company Dr. Gonsalves studied. Cubicles for private phone calls, spaces for quiet concentration, large socialising areas and even outdoor space are common, he says. It’s important for these design elements to be specific to the needs of employees at each company, not based on a preset pattern, he says. “For a long time, the workplace was homogeneous,” Mr. Martinez says. “Now it’s very specific. One size does not fit all.”

Other research suggests the importance of setting up office rules around touchy issues such as cleanliness and quiet areas. Ms. Adikesavan’s research notes the value of providing lockers for employees to store items essential to their work where clean-desk policies are in place.

Management’s role

To get employees to buy into such a setup and come into the office with enthusiasm, companies need to first listen to workers and get their input on creating offices that fit their needs, says Dr. Bergsten of the University of Gavlë. Her 2021 study found that the more workers participated in activities that explained the change process, the higher their overall satisfaction.

Managers’ attitudes also are important, Dr. Bergsten says. In another recent study, she found that workers who perceived their leadership to be change-oriented and supportive of their employees during the transition to hot-desking were more productive after the change than those who didn’t feel that was the case. “Managers should be positive promoters” of this new way of working, she says.

Dr. Candido’s research similarly suggests the importance of company leadership in making hot-desking work. “You can’t be talking about sharing a space and then the manager is always working from the conference room,” the researcher says. “Top to bottom must embrace and engage or it just feels like a cost-saving exercise, which workers will notice.”

What she sees in the research on the topic, she says, is that if unassigned space is well designed and well managed, people will naturally organise at a group level and create a successful workplace. “If you want quiet, go there. If you want to have a coffee with colleagues, go there, etc.,” she says. “It becomes part of the office culture.”

For nearly a decade, workers in a warehouse in Seattle’s Denny Triangle neighbourhood have shipped boxes of shoes, beach chairs, Marvel T-shirts and other items to online retail customers across the U.S.

The operation, called Big River Services International, sells around $1 million a year of goods through e-commerce marketplaces including eBay , Shopify , Walmart and Amazon .com under brand names such as Rapid Cascade and Svea Bliss. “We are entrepreneurs, thinkers, marketers and creators,” Big River says on its website. “We have a passion for customers and aren’t afraid to experiment.”

What the website doesn’t say is that Big River is an arm of Amazon that surreptitiously gathers intelligence on the tech giant’s competitors.

Born out of a 2015 plan code named “Project Curiosity,” Big River uses its sales across multiple countries to obtain pricing data, logistics information and other details about rival e-commerce marketplaces, logistics operations and payments services, according to people familiar with Big River and corporate documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal. The team then shared that information with Amazon to incorporate into decisions about its own business.

Amazon is the largest U.S. e-commerce company , accounting for nearly 40% of all online goods sold in the U.S., according to research firm eMarketer. It often says that it pays little attention to competitors , instead focusing all its energies on being “customer obsessed.” It is currently battling antitrust charges brought last year by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and 17 states, which accused Amazon of a range of behaviour that harms sellers on its marketplace, including using anti-discounting measures that punished merchants for offering lower prices elsewhere.

Workers filled orders at an Amazon fulfillment center in Garner, N.C., in 2021. PHOTO: JEREMY M. LANGE FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The story of Big River offers new insight into Amazon’s elaborate efforts to stay ahead of rivals. Team members attended their rivals’ seller conferences and met with competitors identifying themselves only as employees of Big River Services, instead of disclosing that they worked for Amazon.

They were given non-Amazon email addresses to use externally—in emails with people at Amazon, they used Amazon email addresses—and took other extraordinary measures to keep the project secret. They disseminated their reports to Amazon executives using printed, numbered copies rather than email. Those who worked on the project weren’t even supposed to discuss the relationship internally with most teams at Amazon.

An internal crisis-management paper gave advice on what to say if discovered. The response to questions should be: “We make a variety of products available to customers through a number of subsidiaries and online channels.” In conversations, in the event of a leak they were told to focus on the group being formed to improve the seller experience on Amazon, and say that such research is normal, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Senior Amazon executives, including Doug Herrington , Amazon’s current CEO of Worldwide Amazon Stores, were regularly briefed on the Project Curiosity team’s work, according to one of the people familiar with Big River.

Some aspects were more Maxwell Smart than James Bond. The Big River website contains a glaring typo, and a so-called Japanese streetwear brand that the team concocted lists a Seattle address on its contacts page. Big River’s team members list Amazon as their employer on LinkedIn—potentially blowing their cover.

The LinkedIn page of Max Kless, a former eBay executive who led Big River in Germany before moving to a senior role on the team in the U.S., says that he “developed and led a research subsidiary for Amazon in Germany that prototyped and researched new experiences for Small Business sellers and developers.” Kless didn’t respond to requests for comment.

“Benchmarking is a common practice in business. Amazon, like many other retailers, has benchmarking and customer experience teams that conduct research into the experiences of customers, including our selling partners, in order to improve their experiences working with us,” an Amazon spokeswoman said. Amazon believes its rivals also carry out research on Amazon by selling on Amazon’s site, she said.

Focus on Walmart

Virtually all companies research their competitors, reading public documents for information, buying their products or shopping their stores. Lawyers say there is a difference between such corporate intelligence gathering of publicly available information, and what is known as corporate or industrial espionage.

Companies can get into legal trouble for actions such as hiring a rival’s former employee to obtain trade secrets or hacking a rival. Misrepresenting themselves to competitors to gain proprietary information can lead to suits on trade secret misappropriation, said Elizabeth Rowe, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law who specialises in trade secret law.

Amazon for years has had what it calls a benchmarking team that sizes up rivals to ensure the best experience for people who shop on its site. The team has placed orders on websites such as Walmart.com for delivery around the U.S. to test things such as how long it takes competitors to ship. Other companies also have teams to compare themselves to rivals.

In late 2015, Amazon’s benchmarking team proposed a different sort of project. The business of hosting other merchants to sell their products on Amazon’s platform was becoming increasingly important. So-called third-party sellers on Amazon’s Marketplace, which the company started in 2000, surpassed half of the company’s total merchandise sales that year, and rival retailers had started similar marketplaces.

Amazon wanted to better understand and improve the experiences of those outside vendors. The team decided to create some brands to sell on Amazon to see what the pain points were for sellers—and to sell items on rival marketplaces to compare the experiences, according to the people familiar with the effort.

The benchmarking team pitched “Project Curiosity” to senior management and got the approval to buy inventory, use a shell company and find warehouses in the U.S., Germany, England, India and Japan so they could pose as sellers on competitors’ websites.

The benchmarking team reported into the chief financial officer, Brian Olsavsky , for years, but this year changed to report to Herrington, the consumer chief. Olsavsky and Herrington didn’t respond to requests for comment made through Amazon.

Once launched, the focus of the project quickly started shifting to gathering information about rivals, the people said.

In the U.S., the Big River team started by scooping up merchandise from Seattle retailers holding “going out of business” sales. Some of its first products were Saucony sneakers from a local retailer that was closing. The company registered for a licensing agreement with the popular Marvel superhero franchise to sell Marvel-branded items, and bought items including Tommy Bahama beach chairs from Costco to resell.

In the pitch, Project Curiosity leaders identified online marketplaces that they wanted to sell on, including Best Buy and Overstock.

The top goal was Walmart, Amazon’s biggest rival. But Walmart had a high bar for sellers on its marketplace, accepting only vendors who sold large volumes on other marketplaces first. Big River initially couldn’t qualify to be a Walmart Marketplace seller, but it did sell on Jet.com, which Walmart acquired in 2016 and later closed in 2020. And in India, it sold on Flipkart, the giant Indian e-commerce marketplace in which Walmart owned a majority stake.

In order to meet Walmart’s revenue threshold, the Big River team focused on pumping products through Amazon.com to bolster its overall revenue, some of the people said. Big River’s goal wasn’t to do massive amounts of volume on the competing platforms, but to simply get on them and gain access, they said.

The Amazon spokeswoman said that in 2023, 69% of Big River revenue worldwide was on Amazon.com.

In 2019, Big River finally got onto Walmart’s website. This month, Big River had around 15 products listed on Walmart.com under the seller name Atlantic Lot, including Tommy Bahama beach chairs, cooking woks and industrial-size food containers. In 2023, Big River had more than $125,000 in revenue on Walmart.com alone, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Walmart wasn’t aware that Amazon ran the seller accounts on the Walmart and Flipkart sites before the Journal told it, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Rivals’ logistics services

Atlantic Lot is listed as a “Pro Seller”—a distinction Walmart says is for “top-performing Walmart Marketplace sellers.” Listings show that Walmart Logistics, another Amazon rival, handles storage and shipping for it.

Amazon at the time also was building up its logistics business to store and ship items for sellers for a fee to compete with FedEx and United Parcel Service . The business has boomed over the past decade. Amazon’s total revenue from what it calls third-party seller services has grown nearly twelvefold since 2014 to $140 billion last year, accounting for nearly a quarter of Amazon’s total.

To get information about rival logistics services, the Big River team stored inventory with companies including FedEx. Other targets, according to an internal document, included UPS, DHL, Deliverr and German logistics company Linther Spedition.

FedEx in 2017 launched FedEx Fulfillment, a competitor to Fulfillment by Amazon, for offering logistics to sellers. Big River was accepted into the FedEx Fulfillment program as an early customer, and the team received early details about pricing, rate cards and other terms as a result of the partnership, according to the people. FedEx had several phone calls and email exchanges with Big River team members who represented themselves as Big River employees and didn’t disclose their employment at Amazon, according to some of the people.

The team presented its findings from being part of the FedEx program to senior Amazon logistics leaders. They used the code name “OnTime Inc.” to refer to FedEx. Amazon made changes to its Fulfillment by Amazon service to make it more competitive with FedEx’s new product as a result of the information it learned from the partnership, according to one of the people.

For such meetings, the team avoided distributing presentations electronically to Amazon executives. Instead, they printed the presentations and numbered the documents. Executives could look at the reports and take notes, but at the end of the meeting, team members collected the papers to ensure that they had all copies, the people said.

Big River became a customer of FedEx’s fulfillment program, a competitor to Fulfillment by Amazon. Above, a FedEx facility in Queens, New York. PHOTO: GABBY JONES FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Amazon took other measures to hide the connection with Big River. Staffers were instructed to use their second, non-Amazon email address—which had the domain @bigriverintl.com—when emailing other platforms to avoid outing their Amazon employment.

“We were encouraged to work off the grid as much as possible,” said one of the former team members, about using the outside email.

Amazon’s internal lawyers reminded Big River team members not to disclose their connection to Amazon in their conversations with FedEx, according to an email viewed by the Journal.

Staffers, who worked in private areas of Amazon offices, were told not to discuss their work with other Amazon employees who weren’t cleared to know about the project. In the early days, some Big River team members had to take time away from their Amazon desk jobs to go to the warehouses to fulfill orders and pack them in boxes to send out.

When gaining access to rival seller systems, Big River members were instructed to take screenshots of competitor pricing, ad systems, cataloging and listing pages, according to the people. They weren’t allowed to email the screenshots to Amazon employees, but instead showed the screenshots to the Amazon employees on the Marketplace side of the business in person so they didn’t create a paper trail, some of the people said. Amazon then made changes it believed improved the seller experience on its site based on the information.

The Amazon spokeswoman said the team was secretive so that it wouldn’t get any special treatment as a seller on Amazon.com.

Still, there were telltales. Registration documents filed with the Washington Office of the Secretary of State for Big River Services, while not mentioning Amazon, list a management team made up of current and former Amazon employees, including lawyers. The management team lists its address as 410 Terry Ave. in Seattle, which is Amazon’s headquarters.

Corporate filings for Big River in the United Kingdom and other foreign countries also named officials who are senior Amazon employees and lawyers. In one U.K. disclosure, Amazon is named as owning more than 75% of the company.

Amazon officials felt confident that competitors wouldn’t look up filings to see who was behind the company, some of the people said.

A Las Vegas conference

Some team members were uncomfortable with the work they were doing, according to some of the people.

Among the anxiety-inducing activities was representing themselves as employees of Big River in person while attending conferences thrown by rivals. For instance, team members attended eBay’s Las Vegas conference for sellers, according to some of the people. EBay describes the event as a way for sellers to meet with eBay management and learn of planned big changes coming for sellers and “exclusive information.”

Benchmarking-team leadership ordered up what Amazon calls a PRFAQ that would outline what to do if competitors or the press discovered the project. In the event of a leak, leadership was to say that the group was formed to improve the seller experience on Amazon.com, and that Amazon pays attention to competition but doesn’t “obsess” over it. They were also told to act like this was normal business behavior in the event of a leak, according to one of the people.

In 2017, Amazon formally changed the name of Project Curiosity to the Small Business Insights team to make it sound less cryptic, some of the people said.

The Big River team invented its own brands to sell on the competing sites, including “Torque Challenge” and “Crimson Knot.”

Teams often changed the brand name once they sold out its inventory, creating new brands when they received new products.

In India, Amazon gained access to e-commerce giant Flipkart in March 2018 with the Crimson Knot brand, around the time rumors of a Walmart acquisition swirled in local media. Walmart bought a majority stake in Flipkart in May of that year.

Crimson Knot makes wooden home goods, with its website’s “About Us” page saying: “Based in a small wood workshop in Bangalore, our dedicated team of 8 skilled craftsmen work consistently to handcraft each piece from scratch, transforming them into stunning showstoppers.”

Crimson Knot still lists products on Flipkart and stores them with Flipkart’s logistics services.

The endeavour wasn’t designed to make money. In 2019, for instance, the Indian Big River team projected revenue of $165,000 while it expected costs of $463,000, according to an internal company document.

Each of the five countries operated a little differently to better test different programs. Globally, in total, Big River gained access to rival marketplaces including Alibaba, Etsy, Real.de, Wish and Rakuten, among many other platforms. In 2019, the team set a goal to get onto 13 additional new marketplaces, according to an internal company document.

The Amazon spokeswoman declined to comment on the number of rival websites Big River operates on.

The Japanese team went so far as to create a streetwear brand with its own website and custom-designed products. They called it Not So Ape, saying it was founded in Tokyo in 2017 and “inspired by the street style we see everyday.”

Not So Ape—which isn’t related to an upscale Japanese streetwear brand called A Bathing Ape—says on its website: “Our name stems from our belief that creative expression is what truly separates us from primates.” Not So Ape has Instagram and TikTok accounts, and its site continues to offer products such as $50 knit beanies and $95 hoodies.

Not So Ape is sold on Yahoo Japan’s marketplace, Zozotown, and uses rival payment services from Shopify, Google and Meta platforms. Its U.S. website is hosted by Shopify—which was the target of a previous effort by Amazon, code named “Project Santos,” to replicate parts of its business model, the Journal has reported.

Not So Ape’s English-language site’s terms of service says it is operated by Big River and lists a Seattle contact address of “2300 7th Ave, Ste B100, Back Entrance”—a building adjacent to a main Amazon campus.