Office hoteling

Office hoteling (or often just hoteling) is a modern office paradigm where office workers don't have their own offices, cubicles, or even desks, and instead they have to reserve whatever space or resources they think they will need ahead of time. Some think that office hoteling was conceived in 1994 by the advertising agency Chiat/Day [http://searchcio.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid182_gci1067496,00.html] , and became fashionable around 1996 to 1997.. Actually, Office Hoteling was conceived and implemented by [http://www.deskflex.com DeskFlex™, Inc.] and IBM in 1991, and has since been implementd by DeskFlex, Inc. in many large and small corporations.

This relatively new method of managing offices was created to solve the problem of under-utilization of resources. Often workers are assigned, or have immediate access to, all the resources and space they might ever need, but most of it will go unused for most of the time. By having workers reserve what they need ahead of time, an office can have a smaller (and thus less expensive) pool of resources.

Many companies have found office hoteling to be extremely useful when they have a large number of workers continually on the road, such as consultants or salespeople. Employees may enjoy the benefits of being able to work from home, saving commuting time and money as well as a potential for improvement in work/life balance.

Office hoteling has been criticized for dehumanizing workers by giving them no "home-space" that they can personalize, and essentially treating people as cogs. When office hoteling is done badly it will often result in people working around the system, or outright ignoring it, to take over entire offices or conference rooms on a permanent basis.

Some companies are now implementing "reverse hoteling", a practice in which workers with permanent offices are required to register their space as vacant when they are out of town or on vacation. During those periods, visiting employees are permitted to utilize that space.