the “flex office” or life without a fixed post

Pfirst come, first served (unless you have booked online)! It is neither a classroom nor an overcrowded university library, but the workspace of the future. Especially in the eyes of its ardent defenders, whether they are start-ups or large groups: welcome to a world where the office is a collective good. Laptop in left hand, funny mug in right hand, smartphone in pocket, XXI workere century is ready.

The “flex office”, “desk sharing”, “free seating”, or “dynamic office” (the term is flexible), refers to the absence of a nominative workstation. Goodbye Joël’s snow globe bought in Venice, Mireille’s paperweight, Thierry’s photos of Labrador and Julie’s Mother’s Day gift, except to reinstall everything every morning. Even among the most reformists, personal lockers have survived to house what remains of office customization.

Popularized in 1995 by the American consultants of Accenture, the “flexible office” method saves square meters: between vacations, RTT and field missions, an individual workstation is only occupied by 60%. time on average. With the flex office, there are fewer workstations than employees: the head office of BNP Personal Finance thus has 2,055 “positions” for 2,600 employees, ie a ratio of 0.8. Some companies go down to 0.6, or six offices for ten.

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The Covid-19 could well accelerate the movement: for example it convinced Suez, who converted to “flex”. Some believe that bare offices would be much easier to disinfect every evening, which would allow better health security.

Ridiculous

The well-organized flex office distributes the spaces according to needs: it assumes that the employee chooses a place according to his daily activities. Often, these spaces are designed on the scale of a specific department, of a “team territory” (one floor, for example), and not of the whole company, as at Axa since 2017. Danone has, for its part, instituted drastic rules: ban on going to a meeting without its business, and obligation to vacate the tables after fifteen minutes of absence.

The “flex” is a mentality. After all, the famous physicist Stephen Hawking (1942-2018) said that “Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change”… The non-allocation of offices is therefore decompartmentalization. The opportunity to discuss, to find out what a Web developer really does, to no longer be limited to his three boring colleagues in accounting, in complete transparency, without too much confidentiality. Be careful, for example, not to exclaim that “Even my kid in first grade would draw a better logo than ours”, while this bearded man six meters from you is none other than Chris, thedesign manager ”.

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