New desk policy

NIBR IT As­so­ci­ates -

I re­gret to in­form you that, due to space budget con­straints, NIBR IT lead­er­ship have de­cided to change the de­fault desk as­sign­ment policy from busi­ness class to eco­nomy.

I know this is go­ing to be tough on every­one, but the com­pany has set lim­its, and we must work with­in those para­met­ers to meet our over­all desk space tar­gets.

We have been pi­lot­ing this policy at our 186 MA fa­cil­ity in Cam­bridge. We’ve learned that, des­pite ini­tial con­cerns, as­so­ci­ates can get work done ba­sic­ally any­where, any­how. Crammed around small tables, perched on barstools, hud­dling on the floor around a pro­ject­or - noth­ing will stand in your way as long as a power out­let is near.

We con­cede that the test has re­vealed some neg­at­ives: “I need more space for a mon­it­or”, “where can I put my mouse”, and “I of­ten lose my train of thought when someone ac­ci­dent­ally kicks me”, have come up more than once.

But there have been some pos­it­ives! “I’ve figured out how to stake out space for my fa­vor­ite chair”, “I over­hear the strangest things”, and “it’s warm­er”.

We’ll soon be rolling out this policy in 200 TS in Cam­bridge as well. Dur­ing con­struc­tion, as­so­ci­ates may ex­per­i­ence sub-eco­nomy class (“cattle car”), which should help you ap­pre­ci­ate the com­par­at­ively lar­ger desks of eco­nomy class.

A num­ber of you have made the case that we are un­der­valu­ing busi­ness class desks. You say you need space to pre­pare, room to fo­cus, the abil­ity to be re­freshed be­fore a big work day, that these long work days take time away from your fam­ily, and that the space pays off in con­sid­er­ably more pro­ductiv­ity over­all.

To help ad­dress some of these con­cerns:

  • We re­com­mend you con­sider al­tern­at­ive desk pro­vi­sion­ing op­tions: lib­rar­ies, cof­fee shops, budget air­line seats.
  • We will con­tin­ue the policy of hav­ing “open ac­cess” desks. Good luck!
  • I will be ask­ing the lead­er­ship team to oc­ca­sion­ally wander around hand­ing out stale pea­nuts and Diet Coke.
  • We will semi-ran­domly move your as­signed seats from one spot to an­oth­er to al­le­vi­ate your bore­dom.

Once we’ve com­pleted the new desk space policy rol­lout in Cam­bridge, we’ll ask all of our oth­er sites to fol­low with desk space re­duc­tion pro­grams.

While there may be suf­fi­cient room in the space budget else­where, we’d like all as­so­ci­ates to have to com­pete on an equal play­ing field.

Thank you,

-r’m

[To be clear: Please do not be alarmed. This post is not, in fact, a real policy. It is a satir­ic­al com­ment on the space crunch situ­ation we’ve all got, writ­ten to get you to smile a bit as you try to find some­where to sit. We’re wor­kin’ on it…]