Hot desking, tea rounds and surviving meetings IRL: the new rules of the office

fter two years of lockdowns, offices are almost unrecognisable. In many of them, staff are returning under a hybrid model, working from home a few days a week and coming in for the others. Some organisations slashed their floor space during the pandemic, making what is left feel distinctly cramped, while others have removed desks, and look a lot like departure lounges.

You can also set an alarm on your phone to go off 10 minutes into one of those scheduled informal “chats” that can fill the soul with dread. Once your phone starts vibrating, you can claim it’s an urgent call to do something – anything – else. But how exactly do you tell a colleague that they hum? “I think it would be worth saying: ‘Somebody noticed a smell the other day in a meeting, so I’m just asking everybody to double-check that jackets and shirts are clean.’” In other words, make it vague and make it anonymous. “Explain that you’re just doing a team-wide thing – everybody’s checking, because something has been said; you can’t say by who.

“We’ve seen firms try to do hot-desking before, and one of the ways people tried to retain a little bit of ownership was almost like a dog cocking their leg – they’d keep it disgusting,” says Bruce Daisley, author ofpresenter of the Eat Sleep Work Repeat podcast and former vice-president of Twitter in Europe. “I think that’s a classic performative bit of status. A low-status person definitely wouldn’t dare to leave their space looking dishevelled.

“I think I’d ignore it to start with,” advises Bryant. “If it didn’t go away, I’d ask if they were feeling OK, hint, hint. If it carried on, at the end of the day I might say: ‘Do you think you ought to stay at home tomorrow because it’s horrible for you to have to be in such a dry, air-conditioned environment with your cough.’” Put it as a concern for their comfort, rather than your own, and highlight the fact that, hopefully, many of us are now more able to work from home.

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