Give me my cube back
You spend more than 1/3 of your working day at an office if you have to go into work. That means the spot you get to put your stuff down is important. The newest trend is to allow people to hotel or hot desk, which is a fancy word for "no-one has their own desk."
Three reasons why the hoteling approach should be scrapped:
1.) People like a place to keep their things
We're in an office for the better part of 8-10 hours of a working day. Personal space matters. If you put people into spaces, they make it their own. An apartment, a locker, a car, an anything - people will customize it. Somehow, removing cubes makes an office feel less personal. You swing by a desk and there's nothing to identify the people who are there: no pictures of family, no fun gadgets or gizmos, no candy, no nerf guns, no hastily scrawled sticky notes, etc. It feels devoid of human feeling.
2.) It's the antithesis of collaboration
Imagine you're a taxi driver. Your goal is to get someone from point A to point B. Now, imagine I've stripped the street addresses and made it where anyone could be anywhere. It'd be pretty hard to know where to go. Landmarks and human touch make a space identifiable and help people recognize where to find people and things. It makes it where anytime you need to collaborate you need a meeting space. Listen, I am no summer-child, I too remember when the conversations at your cube would be 45 minutes as you desperately scramble for any polite reason to end it barring a sudden bout of diarrhea. But, having dedicated spaces to find people is helpful to collaborate. For focus work, I would argue that is why people can work at home or implement something like a traffic light system for their cube (red = don't bother me, yellow = if you really need me, green = swing on by I'm checking email or refreshing Hacker News for the fiftieth time).
3.) It's terrible for new people
Every job I've started in the past few years has hot desk-ed. You arrive your first day and walk to a desk. Then, suddenly a person starts rapidly explaining why you cannot sit there. So, you walk to the next and the same thing happens. Before you know it, you really are getting an assigned desk, but one where you cannot personalize it or sit behind a few walls for some privacy. People naturally claim spaces and that is okay. It's a fun and awesome thing to watch a blank canvas get transformed by the people who make it into their space.
So, what should replace hot-desks? Rather than a one-size fits all solution, build a solution to fit each need.
A working space for me? Give me a cube with an adjustable desk where I can get work done productively on my own.
A space to collaborate? Give me a booth or a room with windows and a whiteboard.
A space to relax and team-build? Give me a foosball table.
Build the solutions to fit knowledge worker's ways of being productive and creative rather than the equivalent of a factory floor to see the results flow. No startup, great idea, or brilliant project starts with "I was sitting at my plain nondescript desk I am forced out of every single day..."