Why “hotel” offices are not making P&C employees feel at home

Hotel workspaces may be the rage in hybrid offices, but many Canadian P&C insurance industry employees say they don’t feel at home in the new digs.

Hotelling is a shared workspace model where an employee reserves a desk or room in the office for a set period of time, as a blog on Envoy defines the practice. It also means clearing out unused office furniture to create more open workspaces.

“As the name suggests, hotelling operates in the same way as an actual hotel,” Amy Kirkham, Envoy’s senior content marketing manager, writes in her blog. “You make a reservation, you check-in, you complete your stay, you check-out.”

In Canadian Underwriter’s October 2023 survey regarding the post-pandemic hybrid office, several of the 600 P&C professionals surveyed online panned the model for various reasons.

“Hotel office is the trend,” as one survey respondent summarized. “It could save costs of the company. But it would decrease the engagement of the employees, as they don’t have a secured working space in the office.”

During the pandemic, and now following the rise of the hybrid office, Canadian businesses have turned to office hotelling to capitalize on several benefits.

First of all, the flexible model is supposed to offer the benefits of both private workstations to enhance productivity, but also open spaces for collaboration and team-building. Such “space management” means cutting down on wasted space by removing unused desks and cubicles, since not as many people are working in the office post-COVID.

Not only does this create more open office spaces for collaboration, but it’s also a way to reduce real estate costs.

By removing unused desks and office supplies, employers can save around $11,000 annually per worker who works remotely half the week, according to a Global Workplace Analytics report by IWG, per Envoy.

And finally, the open office space was a way to accommodate social distancing required by public health regulations during the pandemic.

But employees returning to a hybrid office workspace are not feeling welcome in a new hotel environment, comments in CU’s survey reveal.

“Our office has moved to a hotelling system, in which we sign up for a desk each day we’re in,” one survey respondent observed. “It’s destroyed a sense of place and belonging among staff in our office. Quite frankly, the model was a corporate project with little consideration for work function.”

Readers were not specifically asked about hotelling in CU’s survey, but the concept came up numerous times in the anonymous verbatim answers. Of those who shared their hotelling experiences, few had positive things to say about the model.

Among other things, some said ergonomics is a weakness in the new hotel arrangements.

“I didn’t like the office we had pre-COVID,” one respondent wrote. “It had lousy lighting, the cubicles didn’t block any noise, I sat alone, there wasn’t anywhere quiet you could go to do a webinar or take a call, because those spaces were always booked, and there wasn’t a place outside of the department to take a break or go eat lunch if you didn’t want to be paying for food.

“None of these things changed [after returning to the office post-pandemic]. And on top of that, the workstations are now worse-equipped than pre-COVID, because the department has taken whatever stuff was leftover in offices to make the hotelling stations, so they don’t have dual monitors and are not ergonomic.”

Others find the booking system for hotel arrangements still have a number of kinks to work out. “Need better system to book ‘hotelling stations’ and private workspaces when in office,” one P&C professional wrote.

Some companies are mandating that more employees return to the office, but employees say the new hotelling arrangements will make the return of everyone to the office very cramped and difficult.

“Because our company grew a lot over COVID, there are more people than desks available — which has not been an issue yet, [since] people are rotating/hoteling effectively,” one respondent commented. “But there definitely wouldn’t be enough desks if we all showed up on the same day.”

Some think the hotelling system actually defeats the purpose of greater collaboration among team members who do work in the office.

“The [hybrid] model is three days one week, and two days the following week in the office,” wrote one industry professional. “You are to hotel — i.e., find a desk somewhere — so you are likely not to be with your co-workers, so [that] defeats the purpose of camaraderie!”

Said another, when asked about the weakness of the hybrid model at their company: “Loss of team cohesion with in-office workspace changed to hotel stations. Difficult to collaborate and knowledge-share.”

And finally, all of the open space, and limited private desk space, is making it difficult to concentrate and be productive, some observed.

“Since we now have hotel desks, the departments have been combined into areas, which makes it very difficult to hear clients on the phone as it can become very loud at times,” said one. “It’s also a very open concept office space which doesn’t help with noise control.”

Feature image courtesy of iStock.com/Goodboy Picture Company