Hot desking

Hot desking vs. desk booking: two different approaches

In practice, hot desking comes in two forms that are important to distinguish:

Pure hot desking (free seating). No reservations, no assignment rules. You arrive, take an open workstation, and settle in. Simple to implement, but a source of stress when occupancy exceeds 75%.

Desk booking (workstation reservation). Employees reserve their workstations in advance via dedicated software. This is organized hot desking: everyone knows where they’ll be tomorrow, managers can see who will be present, and occupancy peaks are smoothed out. More structured, but requires a reliable tool and adoption by the teams.

The current trend: most companies adopting hot desking in 2025–2026 are opting for desk booking. Pure free seating works in small organizations (fewer than 30 people) but creates too much friction beyond that.

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What to Provide for Each Hot-Desking Workstation

A hot-desking workstation is more than just a desk and a chair. For the system to work, each workstation must be self-contained and impersonal:

Basic equipment. An external monitor, a keyboard and mouse, an accessible power outlet, and a stable Ethernet or Wi-Fi connection. The employee arrives with their laptop, plugs it in, and starts working in less than 2 minutes.

Personal storage. Since the desk belongs to no one, personal belongings must be stored elsewhere. Provide individual lockers, ideally near the workstations. One locker per employee, with a code or a badge.

The clean desk policy. Non-negotiable rule: at the end of the day (or half-day), the workstation must be cleaned and cleared. No personal items, no files, no mugs left on the desk. This policy must be posted, communicated during the first few weeks, and enforced.

Hygiene. Disinfectant wipes or spray available at each workstation cluster. This has become standard since Covid, and it’s a key factor in gaining acceptance among employees reluctant to share.

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Practical problems (and how to solve them)

“I can never find a spot on Tuesdays.” Tuesdays and Wednesdays are the busiest days at most French companies. Solution: Implement staggered workdays by team (Team A works Monday-Tuesday, Team B works Wednesday-Thursday) or set up desk booking to even out demand.

“I waste 15 minutes every morning just getting set up.” If the dock doesn’t work, if the monitor isn’t the right one, if the Wi-Fi is slow, hot desking becomes a daily source of frustration. Solution: Standardize the equipment (same dock, same monitor, same configuration on all workstations) and thoroughly test it before deployment.

“I never know where my colleagues are.” Without a fixed workstation, finding a team member can sometimes feel like a treasure hunt. Solution: a desk booking tool with a “who’s where today” view, paired with team-based seating zones (workstations aren’t assigned, but each team has its preferred area).

“I no longer have a personal space.” This is the most common resistance. A personal desk is a marker of identity; losing it can feel like a step backward. Solution: compensate with high-quality lockers, shared personalization areas (a team wall, a project space), and transparent communication about the reasons for the change.

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Hot desking and real estate: the domino effect

Hot desking has a direct impact on a company’s space requirements. By reducing the number of workstations needed, it automatically frees up square footage and sometimes an entire floor.

The question that follows is always the same: what to do with this freed-up space? There are three options. Return it to the landlord (possible only on the three-year lease anniversary). Repurpose it as meeting rooms, collaborative spaces, or wellness areas which absorbs part of it, but rarely all of it. Or monetize it by making it available to other companies through a space operator.

It is this third option that interests companies seeking to maximize the return on their real estate. An operator like Sora can transform this surplus space into managed office spaces, generating revenue that directly offsets the cost of the lease without subleasing... through the service agreement.