The Manager’s Guide to Hot Desking: Best Practices and Common Pitfalls

You’ve probably noticed that the traditional office setup—where everyone has their own desk with their coffee mug collection and three-year-old stack of papers—is becoming about as common as a fax machine. Hot desking has arrived, and whether you chose it or it chose you, here we are.

Hot desking sounds simple on paper: employees share workspaces instead of having assigned seats. But if you’re managing a team through this change, you already know the paper version and the lived experience are two different things. People have feelings about where they sit. They have routines. They have that one spot by the window they’ve been eyeing since 2019.

The truth is, hot desking works brilliantly for some teams and creates genuine problems for others. Your job isn’t to be a cheerleader for a seating policy—it’s to make whatever system you have actually function for real humans doing real work.

This guide skips the corporate speak and gets into what actually matters when you’re managing hot desking day-to-day:

• How to set up hot desking so people can actually get their work done (not just save the company money)
• The mistakes other managers have already made, so you don’t have to repeat them
• Practical ways to handle the conflicts, complaints, and chaos that come with shared spaces
• Real solutions for the problems nobody mentions in the implementation memo

We’re not here to convince you that hot desking is revolutionary or terrible. We’re here to help you manage it well, because chances are, you’re doing it whether you like it or not.

Before we get into the how-to, let’s make sure we’re talking about the same thing. Hot desking gets thrown around in meetings alongside “agile workspace” and “flexible seating,” but what does it actually look like when people show up on Monday morning?

At its core, hot desking means employees don’t have assigned desks. They choose (or are assigned) a workspace when they arrive, use it for the day or week, and someone else might use it tomorrow. Think of it like a coffee shop, except everyone works for the same company and someone’s definitely going to forget their laptop charger.
The variations you’ll see in the wild:

• First-come, first-served: People grab whatever desk is open when they arrive
• Booking systems: Employees reserve desks through an app or calendar system
• Neighborhood seating: Teams have designated areas, but individuals can sit anywhere within them
• Hoteling: More formal reservations, often for specific time blocks or resources
• Activity-based working: Different zones for different work types (focus areas, collaboration spaces, phone booths)

Let’s be honest about why companies adopt hot desking. The official reasons often involve words like “collaboration” and “innovation,” but the real drivers are more straightforward. Office space costs real money—a lot of it. When data shows that desks sit empty 40-60% of the time because of remote work, travel, and flexible schedules, the math starts looking pretty attractive to someone in finance.

But money isn’t the whole story. Work patterns have genuinely changed. Teams are more distributed. People come to the office for different reasons than they did five years ago. Some days you need to sit with your team and hash things out. Other days you need quiet focus time. Hot desking, when done right, can actually match how people work now rather than how they worked in 1995.

The part that catches managers off guard? Your team’s reaction probably won’t be uniform. You’ll have people who love the flexibility and others who feel unmoored without their regular spot. Some will see it as modern and efficient. Others will see it as the company being cheap. Both groups have a point, and your job is to make it work for all of them.

Here’s where theory meets reality. You can have the best booking system and the most ergonomic chairs in the world, but if you ignore what hot desking does to people psychologically, you’re going to have problems. Humans are territorial creatures who also crave flexibility. We want freedom and routine. We’re contradictory, and that’s okay.

We’ve been claiming spaces since we were kids fighting over the good seat on the couch. Having “your desk” isn’t just about convenience—it’s about having a small piece of predictability in your workday. When you take that away, some people feel it more than others.

What’s actually happening in people’s heads:

• Loss of control: Not knowing where you’ll sit tomorrow creates low-level anxiety for some people
• Identity and belonging: Your desk was proof you belonged somewhere; now that anchor is gone
• Efficiency concerns: “Where did I leave that notebook?” becomes a daily question
• Vulnerability: Starting each day by finding a seat can feel exposing, especially for newer employees
• The comparison game: Who gets the window seat becomes more visible when it changes daily

Hot desking affects different people differently, and pretending everyone should just adapt equally is naive. Your extroverts might genuinely thrive with the variety and chance encounters. Your introverts might be spending mental energy every single day on logistics that used to be automatic.

The spectrum you’re managing:

• The adapters: Genuinely don’t mind where they sit, find it refreshing
• The routiners: Need predictability to do their best work, feel unsettled by constant change
• The socializers: Love the chance to sit with different people, see it as a networking opportunity
• The focus seekers: Need the same quiet corner every time or their productivity tanks
• The territorial: Will absolutely try to claim the same desk daily through informal systems

One of the quieter challenges of hot desking is what it does to team dynamics. When your team doesn’t sit together automatically, you lose the casual conversations that build relationships and solve small problems before they become big ones. The random “hey, quick question” over the desk divider disappears.

This doesn’t mean hot desking kills team cohesion, but it does mean you can’t rely on physical proximity to do the relationship-building work for you anymore. You’ll need to be more intentional about creating chances for your team to connect. Regular team meetings become less bureaucratic and more necessary. Lunch together matters more. The informal stuff needs to become slightly more formal, which feels backward but works.

The good news? Some teams actually get closer because they have to try harder. The bad news? Some teams drift apart because nobody noticed until it was already happening. Your awareness makes the difference.

If you’re implementing hot desking or trying to fix a system that’s already limping along, the setup phase matters more than you think. Get this right, and you’ll prevent about 80% of the complaints you’d otherwise hear. Get it wrong, and you’ll be playing referee over desk assignments for the next year.

Forget the one-size-fits-all approach. Your office needs different types of spaces because your team does different types of work. Someone on a client call needs something completely different than someone debugging code or writing a report.

What your space should include:

• Quiet zones: For deep work, minimal distractions, no spontaneous meetings
• Collaboration areas: Tables big enough for laptops and coffee cups, whiteboards nearby
• Phone booths or small rooms: Because taking a personal call at a shared desk is awkward for everyone
• Variety in desk setups: Standing desks, monitors of different sizes, near windows vs. away from windows
• Enough of everything: If 60% of your team is in the office on Tuesdays, you need desks for 60% of your team, not 40%

The booking system is where hot desking lives or dies. If reserving a desk takes longer than finding one naturally, people won’t use it. If it’s confusing, people will ignore it and you’ll have conflicts. If it’s too rigid, people will hate it.

Your system needs to be simple enough that someone can book a desk in under a minute, flexible enough to handle last-minute changes, and integrated with whatever calendar system your team already uses. Nobody wants to learn a new platform just to sit down.

Beyond booking, think about the practical stuff: Do people have lockers for personal items? Are there enough charging stations that someone isn’t sacrificing their laptop battery so someone else can charge their phone? Can people plug in their own monitors and keyboards easily, or is there a cable situation that requires an engineering degree?

Pro tips for technology setup:

• Test your booking system with actual employees before rolling it out company-wide
• Make sure every desk has the same basic tech setup so there are no “better” desks technology-wise
• Have a simple troubleshooting guide posted visibly—not buried in an email from three months ago
• Assign someone to monitor and maintain the technology; don’t let it become everyone’s problem and therefore no one’s problem

You need rules, but you don’t need a manifesto. The goal is clarity without making people feel like they’re back in grade school asking for a bathroom pass.

What your policy should cover:

• Booking windows: How far in advance can people book? Can they book the same desk every day for a week?
• Desk cleanliness: What’s expected at the end of each day (clear desk, wipe down, return supplies)
• Storage solutions: Where do personal items go, and what’s the locker policy
• No-shows: What happens if someone books a desk and doesn’t show up
• Conflicts: Who decides when two people both think they reserved the same desk
• Special accommodations: How do you handle people who need specific setups for health or accessibility reasons

Keep it short. If your hot desking policy is longer than two pages, you’ve overthought it. People need to know the basics, not read a legal document.

Every manager who’s tried hot desking has learned some lessons the hard way. The good news is, most problems are predictable. The bad news is, they’re still annoying. Here’s what actually goes wrong and what you can do about it.

These are the problems that show up in week two and don’t go away on their own:

• Musical chairs syndrome: People arrive at the same time, scramble for desks, and someone ends up working from the break room
• The hierarchy problem: Senior staff informally claim the best spots, and nobody wants to be the person who sits in the VP’s “unofficial” desk
• Ghost reservations: People book desks “just in case” and don’t show up, leaving desks empty while others search
• The 8:59 AM panic: Everyone tries to book desks at the last minute because planning ahead feels like too much commitment
• Desk squatting: Someone finds a good spot and tries to claim it permanently through sheer presence
• The supplies black hole: Staplers, notepads, and pens disappear faster than you can restock them

Here’s a problem nobody thinks about until day three: where does everyone’s stuff go? People accumulate things—extra chargers, snacks, backup shoes, that sweater for when the AC is too cold. With hot desking, all of that needs a home, or you’ll have bags cluttering desks and people leaving personal items overnight, which defeats half the point.

Lockers seem like the obvious solution until you realize you need one per person, they need to be big enough to actually be useful, and someone has to manage the keys or codes. Some companies go with small daily lockers where you grab one each morning. Others assign permanent lockers that become mini storage units. Both work, but you need something. Without designated storage, people will create their own systems, and those systems will be messy.

The belongings issue also creates a daily friction point. People forget things at their desks. They leave coffee cups. They can’t find their notebook from yesterday. Some of this is just the cost of hot desking, but you can reduce it. End-of-day reminders help. Clear desk policies help. Having a lost-and-found that actually gets checked helps. Making peace with the fact that some chaos is inevitable also helps.

Quick tips for managing the mess:

• Set up a 5-minute end-of-day alarm as a company-wide reminder to clear desks
• Keep a “left behind” bin at reception that gets cleared weekly
• Make locker assignments as easy as desk bookings
• Accept that the office will never look as tidy as when everyone had assigned desks
• Have cleaning supplies visible and accessible so people can wipe down their own spaces

The setup phase is one thing. Actually managing hot desking when your team is using it every day is another. This is where good systems prove themselves and bad ones fall apart. Your goal isn’t perfection—it’s a system that works well enough that people stop thinking about it.

Your booking system needs to fade into the background. If people are talking about the booking system, something’s wrong. The best ones are boring in the best possible way—they work, people use them, nobody has opinions about them.

What makes a booking system actually usable:

• Mobile-friendly: People book desks from the parking lot, not their laptops at home
• Visual floor plans: Seeing where desks are beats scrolling through lists of desk numbers
• Quick rebooking: If someone likes where they sat today, let them book the same spot for tomorrow in one tap
• Flexible cancellation: No penalties for canceling, or people will ghost their reservations instead
• Integration with calendars: If it syncs with Outlook or Google Calendar, people are more likely to use it
• Clear availability: Show real-time what’s open right now, not just future bookings

The worst thing you can do is pick a system that’s “feature-rich” but clunky to use. Your team will route around it, and then you’re managing hot desking without any system at all, which is somehow worse than having no system in the first place.

Conflicts will happen. Someone will book a desk and find someone else sitting there. Two people will swear they reserved the same spot. Someone will complain that they can never get a desk near their team. This is normal, and how you handle these situations sets the tone for everything else.

When conflicts come up, resist the urge to create new rules for every scenario. Most problems are one-offs that don’t need policy changes—they need a manager who’ll make a quick call and move on. Save the rule-making for patterns that keep repeating.

For complaints, listen for what people are actually saying underneath the surface complaint. “The booking system is confusing” might mean “I feel anxious about not having a regular spot.” “There are never desks available” might mean “I’m coming in at 10 AM and everyone else books at 8 AM.” Address the real issue, not just the stated one.

Balance is the tricky part. Some structure keeps things fair and predictable. Too much structure makes hot desking feel more restrictive than having assigned desks ever did. You want guidelines that most people follow most of the time, with enough flex that exceptions don’t break the whole system. If your hot desking rules require enforcement more than once a week, you’ve probably overcomplicated things.

Hot desking isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it system. What works for your team today might not work six months from now. People change, teams grow, work patterns shift. The managers who do this well are the ones who stay alert to when things stop working and adjust before small problems become big ones.

Your hot desking setup needs regular check-ins, not just when people are complaining loudly. Pay attention to the patterns and behaviors that signal something’s off.

If people are consistently booking desks but working from home instead → Then your office setup isn’t meeting their needs, or they’re gaming the system to hold spots

If the same desks never get booked → Then something’s wrong with those locations (bad lighting, too much noise, broken equipment)

If booking rates suddenly drop → Then people might be reverting to informal systems or avoiding the office entirely

If you’re adding exceptions to your policy every month → Then your original policy doesn’t match how people actually work

If certain teams never sit together anymore → Then you might need designated team zones, even in a hot desking setup

If complaints are increasing over time rather than decreasing → Then the system isn’t settling in—something fundamental needs to change

The temptation when hot desking isn’t working perfectly is to add more rules. Someone abuses the booking system, so you create a three-strike policy. People leave desks messy, so you implement inspection checklists. Before you know it, you’ve built a bureaucracy around something that was supposed to simplify things.

Resist this. Most problems can be solved with communication, not regulation. When you do need to adjust, change the environment before you change the rules. If people are hoarding supplies, add more supply stations instead of tracking who took what. If certain desks are always fought over, add more desks with those features. Make the easy choice the right choice, and you won’t need to police behavior as much.

Remember that your team is changing too. New hires experience hot desking differently than people who were there before it started. As your team grows, your ratio of desks to people might need adjusting. When teams reorganize, their seating needs might shift. Stay flexible enough to adapt without questioning the whole system every time something changes.

Sometimes hot desking just doesn’t work for your team, and that’s okay. Maybe your team needs to be physically together more than you realized. Maybe the cost savings aren’t worth the productivity hit. Maybe the technology infrastructure in your building can’t support it properly. The question isn’t whether hot desking is good or bad in general—it’s whether it’s working for your specific situation.

Signs it might be time to reconsider: turnover increases and people cite the office setup in exit interviews. Productivity metrics decline and stay down. Team collaboration suffers and doesn’t recover. The amount of time you spend managing hot desking conflicts exceeds the time you spend managing your actual team. People are working from home specifically to avoid hot desking.

If you’re seeing these patterns, you have options. You don’t have to abandon flexibility entirely—maybe assigned desks for people who are in-office full-time and hot desking for hybrid workers. Maybe neighborhood seating where teams have zones but individuals can move around. Maybe a hybrid approach where people have an assigned desk three days a week and hot desk the other two.

The worst thing you can do is stick with a system that clearly isn’t working because changing it feels like admitting failure. It’s not. It’s managing.

Here’s what nobody tells you in the implementation training: hot desking is never going to be everyone’s favorite thing. Some people will adapt quickly and genuinely enjoy the flexibility. Others will tolerate it because they have to. A few will quietly resent it forever. All of those reactions are valid, and your job isn’t to make everyone love it—it’s to make it work anyway.

Hot desking succeeds or fails based on a few key factors that have nothing to do with the furniture or the booking app:

• Your willingness to listen: When people complain, they’re usually telling you something useful, even if it doesn’t sound that way at first
• Flexibility within structure: Rules that bend without breaking make everyone’s life easier
• Addressing problems quickly: Small annoyances become major resentments when they’re ignored for months
• Realistic expectations: Hot desking solves some problems and creates others—knowing which is which helps you manage both
• Regular attention: The system needs maintenance, not just at the start but ongoing

Your role isn’t to be the hot desking cheerleader or the policy enforcer. It’s to be the person who makes sure the system works for real humans doing real work, and who adjusts when it doesn’t.

If you take nothing else from this guide, take this: hot desking is a tool, not a philosophy. It’s a way to organize physical workspace in a world where work patterns have changed. Sometimes it’s the right tool. Sometimes it’s not. Most of the time, it’s somewhere in between—good enough if you manage it well, frustrating if you don’t.

You’ll make mistakes. Everyone does. You’ll implement a policy that sounds great and turns out to be annoying. You’ll miss a problem until someone points it out. You’ll have days where you wonder why anyone thought shared desks were a good idea. That’s all part of it.

The managers who do this well aren’t the ones who create perfect systems. They’re the ones who stay aware, stay flexible, and remember that systems exist to serve people, not the other way around. Keep that in mind, and you’ll figure out the rest as you go.