Desk shortage forcing civil servants to work in corridors and canteens after back-to-office order | Staff outnumber desks by two to-one acrossd department, report says

24 comments

  1. > Civil servants at the Department for Education (DfE) have been forced to work in canteens and corridors due to a shortage of desks after being ordered back into office.

    Increasingly I feel the UK should install a massive “NOT SATIRE” warning, visible from space, so that visitors are left with no doubts that our shit is indeed real.

  3. Who would have through that Jacob Rees Mogg, a man renowned to have his finger on the pulse and being detailed oriented, would cock this up so badly. Its not like it is well known and well established that there are not enough desks to support all staff retuning to the office.

  6. it’s ok ‘cos lots of them are getting culled, apparently.Also they won’t be able to find a rude note from Rees-Mogg on their desk if they haven’t even got a desk.

  7. Once they’ve sacked 90,000 of them there’ll be plenty of desks for the frantic, demoralised survivors.

  8. Strikes me from this that Moggy has very much, a micro-manager perspective on the doers of this country.

    Micro-managers have to have you in the office so that they can see that you’re working. A good majority of this type of manager can’t or don’t know how to manage their workforce and it just comforts them some how…..maybe. Of course, not everyone can do their job at home but their certainly needs to be more flexibility in the work place these days.

  11. I worked in the DfE London office before the pandemic and even then this sort of thing wasn’t unheard of. I can imagine it’s replayed across a lot of large offices – one of the big selling points of open plan hot desking is that you can put in fewer desks than you have staff as long as everyone is not in at the same time, but this philosophy obviously doesn’t help you if this is not the case, which many teams will come close to at some point Tues-Thurs. It’s also not the desk efficiency silver bullet that some people would like you to believe – even while some staff can’t find a desk in their area and resort to ad hoc measures, other teams will have banks of empty desks. But people feel awkward sitting outside of their area so these continue to go unused. I’m aware that other employers (some of which I’ve worked for) follow a similar hot desk philosophy, and must necessarily be running into similar problems.

  13. Not enough desks? But where will the haunted pencil himself, JRM, leave your passive aggressive note when you decide to just work from home?

  20. Time until they set up a VIP lane for friends of the conservative party to request contracts to supply desks from their companies that they set up five minutes ago, having no experience in supplying desks in the past?

  23. It has been the case that many UK government departments depend upon working from home since long before covid.

    It is the policy of some departments only to have desks equivalent to 60% staffing, on the basis that holidays, sickness, meetings outside the office and yes, working from home, mean that typically only 60% of staff are physically present at any time.

    I’m not sure which was more foolish, that Rees-Mogg gave this instruction or that the civil servants tried to follow it.

  24. I really hope each and every one of those being forced to work at non-work desks are reporting their concerns regarding proper desk chairs, eye height for the display and so on to the HSE

Leave a Reply