Shared desks, a property saving above all

The arrangement rests on an average desk occupancy rate below one hundred per cent, owing to absences, travel and remote work. It allows fewer square metres to be leased for the same headcount.

That calculation is the main documented motive in company decisions. Arguments about collaboration and cross-cutting exchange are generally advanced as a complement. The spread of remote work has strengthened the argument, since it lowers the average occupancy rate on which the calculation rests.

The debate is not new. As early as the late 1950s, German consultants were proposing the office landscape, and the modular partitions designed by Robert Propst in the 1960s already aimed to reconcile openness and privacy, before turning into rows of cubicles.

Available work concerns mainly reported satisfaction, time spent finding a desk, and perceptions of noise and privacy.

It finds contrasting results by occupation: more favourable for mobile activities and coordination roles, less favourable for activities requiring prolonged concentration. Before-and-after studies are rare and often conducted by the projects' contractors, which calls for caution.

Studies measuring interaction through sensors rather than questionnaires have produced unexpected results. A study published in 2018 by Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban finds a fall in face-to-face interaction after a move to a more open space, offset by a rise in written exchange.

That result concerns two firms and short periods. It contradicts the argument most frequently advanced in favour of such layouts, which explains its wide circulation. It also concerns the opening up of space, which is not the same thing as removing assigned desks, even though the two often go together.

Work in environmental psychology, including that of Irwin Altman on privacy and territory in the 1970s, documents the importance of personalisation and control over one's space, associated with reported satisfaction and with strain indicators.

Removing the assigned desk takes away both elements, which is the mechanism most often invoked to explain the unfavourable results observed in some configurations. Field observations in fact describe informal reappropriation, with the same people taking the same desk every day.

The labour code imposes obligations on premises layout, lighting, acoustic environment and risk prevention, independently of desk assignment.

Redevelopment projects also fall under consultation with staff representatives, which makes them an object of negotiation rather than a simple property management decision.