Mandate Monday: The Floor Plan Arrives

A0, in colour, laminated, with a legend. Somebody has done real work on this and the work is good — it is legible, it is to scale, and it answers questions.

It answers, for instance, the question of where I sit, which is nowhere. Desk 4-118 is now part of a shape labelled COLLAB in a colour the legend calls sage.

I am not going to pretend to be surprised. This has been coming since the mandate and I have written about it for two months. What I did not expect was to find out from a poster, at the same moment and in the same way as everybody else, standing in a coat.

By quarter past nine there was a small crowd doing what crowds do at a plan: finding themselves first, then finding their friends, then finding whoever they do not want to sit near.

Both plans are to scale and both are on the wall, forty centimetres apart, which was either an oversight or the bravest thing facilities has ever done.

The sage areas sit exactly where blocks of four desks sat. Same footprint, same grid, and in two cases the same slightly wrong angle where the block worked around a pillar.

This is not a conspiracy. It is a plan drawn on top of a plan, which is what everybody does. But it does mean the collaboration areas have inherited the geometry of the thing they were supposed to replace, pillar and all.

Sixty of them, by the north stairwell, on a Tuesday, with no announcement. At the time the theory was gym bags.

It was not gym bags. You do not need a locker if you have a desk, and the lockers arrived twenty-one days before the plan that removes the desks.

I mention it because there is a lesson in it that has nothing to do with my office. The furniture always arrives before the memo. If you want to know what is being decided about you, stop reading the intranet and look at what is being delivered.

I have covered this building through the mandate, the hot desk trial, the badge audit and two reorganisations, and the volume has come down every single time.

On Monday there was no argument at the plan. There was a lot of photographing, some pointing, one laugh, and a queue for the lift. Then everybody went and sat at desks that will not exist in November and had a normal day.

The comfortable reading is that people have accepted it. I do not think that is what I watched. I think a room learns, quite fast, that objecting at the poster is a performance with no audience that can act, and the objections move to WhatsApp, to one-to-ones, and to a resignation in six weeks with an unrelated reason attached.

Quiet is not agreement. Quiet is what disagreement sounds like once it has worked out where the decision is actually made, and it is not made by the lifts.

No comment. No photograph. Nine seconds, a small nod, and off to the machine.

I caught up with him later and asked, because I am incapable of not asking, and he said he has been moved four times and has ended up back within six metres of the window every single time.

He is not on the new plan either. He is completely unbothered. He says he will end up by the window, and on the evidence of fourteen years I would not bet against him.