Question: Senior management at my company are talking about possibly introducing hot desking\*, which might be introduced at the same time as an office move planned in a few months. The new location will be large enough to accommodate the company size; there will be enough desks for everyone, space is not a problem.

What problems does hot desking strive to solve, apart from not having enough desks?

Does it actually solve those problems?

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\*From [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_desking): *"Hot desking is an office organization system which involves multiple workers using a single physical work station or surface during different time periods. The "desk" in the name refers to an office desk being shared by multiple office workers on different shifts as opposed to each staff member having their own personal desk."* 

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*Update*

Etiquette is: I select only one answer, but several answers here answer this question; there are several other excellent answers.

Answer: 
Hotdesking doesn't solve any problems, no matter whether the office is too small or not.

I've worked at a company that had 20-40% fewer seats than employees. Battles for chairs cost us (and company...) plenty of time. It was a drama. The most important part of the day was ensuring you had a chair.

Your company is probably expecting to grow. This could explain why they want to introduce the system now.

Or maybe they just want people to "network more". But that's not the way to achieve that.
Proponents of hot-desking (who usually prefer other terms like "unassigned seating") often argue that it encourages collaboration/networking within the organisation. For instance, [this blog post](http://blog.turningart.com/flexible-workspaces-what-they-are-and-why-you-need-them) says: 

> 
> An article around workplace design in the Harvard Business Review
>  collected performance data ... and found that “face-to-face
>  interactions are by far the most important activity in an office.”
>  Moreover, their data suggests that creating chance encounters and
>  unplanned interactions, a design concept Steve Jobs pioneered at
>  Pixar, improves performance. By instituting unassigned desks and
>  communal work areas, employees are more likely to move throughout the
>  day, which facilitates interaction and collaboration between employees
>  who might have minimal interaction otherwise.
> 
> 
> 

However, this isn't an entirely accurate characterisation of [the HBR article that it cites](https://hbr.org/2014/10/workspaces-that-move-people). That article notes that different solutions work for different workplaces, and discusses a case study where hot-desking gave very poor results:

> 
> Companies must have an understanding of what they’re trying to achieve
>  (higher productivity? more creativity?) before changing a space. For
>  example, what worked at the pharma company didn’t work at a large
>  furniture manufacturer that transformed its headquarters from classic
>  cubicles to an open-plan office in which approximately 60% of the
>  workforce had unassigned seating ... The company had hypothesized that
>  fewer desks and a smaller footprint would move people closer together,
>  increasing the likelihood of interaction. Unassigned seating would
>  make interaction between people in different groups more likely. Such
>  interaction did increase, by 17%—but energy levels (the number of
>  individuals’ encounters during the day) dropped by an average of 14%.
>  This suggests that the space simply reshuffled stationary workers
>  rather than creating movement. Someone from marketing might bump into
>  new people because their temporary desks happened to be close by, but
>  none of them were leaving their workstations once they got there. **As a
>  result, team communication dropped by 45%. The company saved money on
>  space by reducing the number of fixed workstations, but both revenue
>  and productivity plummeted.**
> 
> 
> 

My workplace moved to hot-desking a couple of years back. Although this kind of unplanned interaction was mentioned as one of the benefits, I don't think it's substantially increased. People tend to prefer sitting in a familiar place, so most of us now alternate between two or three standard locations. Moreover, because accommodation is coordinated at workgroup level, each workgroup ends up with its own "home zone" so even though we shuffle round a bit, we're still sitting with the same people.

One complication here is that we moved to about 30% teleworking at the same time as we adopted hot-desking, and obviously teleworking reduces unplanned interactions.