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: 
There are too many unknowns to answer your question. But, from experience, I can give a couple of examples where hot desking makes sense:

At my current place of employment, most departments don't use hot desking -- since most people work from the office. Except for our largest department: customer care. Customer care works 24/7/365, which many agents only working between 24 and 32 hours a week. We'd need a few more offices if everyone had their own desk.

I used to work for a company where its employees would spend most of their time at customers. Sometimes, I wouldn't be in the office for several months in a row. We did have a few desks to host people who would be in the office, but there weren't enough desks to seat everyone at the same time.

My spouse works at a place where everyone has a 3 or 4 day workweek. The office is small, and putting in enough desks for everyone would violate health and safety rules. Hot desking solves this problem.

Whether any of the situations described above apply to your company, I cannot deduce from your question.
The problem hot-desking is trying to solve is **exactly** "not having enough desks". I used to work for a consulting company where I would spend 95% of time at the customers' and maybe 5% at the office. The office could only accommodate maybe 20% of all consultants, but there was never a shortage of seats so hot desking totally made sense.

Another use case for hot-desking is when a significant share of employees wear several hats at a time. If 100 people spend 50% of their time at the office and another 50% of time in a lab, it's tempting to organize 50 office desks and 50 lab desks instead of 100. The downside is that sometimes a most of people have to do the same kind of work (end-of-year reports and such) and suddenly half of the employees have to do office work at the lab with poor Internet and no printers.

Employers who claim that hot-desking is introduced to solve a different problem than the lack of desks are usually hiding unpopular reasons (saving costs at the expense of worse working conditions) under cool slogans about team cohesion and agility.