Few aspects of office life are more dispiriting than hot-desking, the penny-pinching ploy that strips people of their own desk and casts them out to the noisy, chaotic wasteland of shared work spots.
But not that long ago, I discovered an even more troubling side to this irksome practice.
It happened when I was invited to hear an HR boss from a large global company give a private talk in London about the benefits of “agile working” in her office. I accepted at once, keen to hear more about the baffling concept of “agile”, an adjective that has morphed into a corporate jargon noun with a multitude of meanings, especially in the world of HR.