Flexible office models: hot desking, hoteling, activity-based working and neighborhoods

Most enterprise workplaces no longer run one seating model. They run a mix: hoteling office space for people who want a guaranteed desk, activity-based working settings for different kinds of tasks, some first-come shared desks, and neighborhoods where teams can find each other. The labels get used loosely, so it pays to be precise about what each model asks of employees and of the workplace team.

The pattern across all of them is consistent. The model matters less than the operating system around it. Hot desking earned its reputation from uncertainty, not from desk sharing as such. Hoteling, activity-based working and neighborhoods each remove part of that uncertainty, and they work best when the layout comes with booking rules, live visibility and a clear reason for people to come in.

What are the main flexible office models?

The main flexible office models are hot desking, hoteling, activity-based working and office neighborhoods, with assigned desks and outside coworking space at either end. They differ in how space is assigned: first come, first served, reserved in advance, chosen by task, or grouped by team. Most workplaces combine several models across one building.

• Assigned desks give each person a permanent workstation.
• Hot desking is desk sharing where desks are allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.
• Hoteling is desk sharing where employees reserve a desk in advance and check in when they arrive.
• Activity-based working replaces the single desk with a range of settings built for different tasks.
• Office neighborhoods group flexible desks into zones for a team, a project, a working style or a shared need.
• Flexible and coworking space gives employees access to workspaces outside the organization’s own buildings.

What are the pros and cons of hot desking?

Hot desking is a desk sharing model where desks are allocated on a first-come, first-served basis. Its pros are freed-up space, departments mixing, an uncluttered office and flatter hierarchies. Its cons are uncertainty, time lost searching for a desk and difficulty finding colleagues. A booking system, office neighborhoods and reinvested space address most of the cons.

A 2012 survey, cited in Kadence’s December 2021 look at the pros and cons of hot desking, reported that 9 in 10 workers found it morale-sapping. Weighing hot desking pros and cons still shows a real case for it. Because you do not need one desk per employee, it frees space to cut your real estate footprint or to give back as breakout areas and meeting rooms. People sit with other departments, which breaks down silos. And when managers no longer get first pick of the best desks, hierarchies flatten.

The complaints come down to uncertainty and wasted time. Late arrivals get the seats nobody else wants. Finding colleagues is just as hard: in a building spread over several floors, a quick 2-minute chat with a colleague could turn into a 20-minute hunt around the entire building.

Writing about the future of hot desking in August 2024, Kadence pointed to Ryan Anderson’s description of unassigned desking as a “hot mess” when it is not implemented thoughtfully, because it erodes a sense of belonging and assumes one model suits everyone. The better answer is a variety of spaces and a sense that each employee has a home base, even without an assigned desk. The same piece cited industry figures that 27% of employees prefer permanent workstations, and advised a private and consistent solution for people who handle extremely sensitive information or need a consistent structure.

Three fixes make hot desking acceptable:

• Add booking. A desk booking system removes the number one complaint, uncertainty, and long-term bookings let people who like consistency keep a regular desk.
• Add neighborhoods. Team-based, activity-based and project-based zones put people near the colleagues or amenities they need.
• Reinvest the space. Hot desking done only to cut costs can feel like a downgrade. Giving freed space to wellbeing areas changes how the move is received.

What is hoteling office space?

Hoteling office space is a flexible setup where employees reserve a desk in advance and check in when they arrive, similar to booking a hotel room. Nobody has a permanent desk, so fewer desks are needed. Unlike hot desking, people know a desk is waiting before they travel, and unused bookings can be released back to the pool.

Kadence described hoteling office space in April 2021 as the gold standard of flexible workplace setups. The same piece cited a Steelcase study that found a strong link between employee engagement and workplace satisfaction, with the employees who had the most control over their workplace reporting the highest engagement. Hoteling gives people that control. It also supports team rhythms: teams can book regular space for a weekly planning session, and a project team can reserve space in one neighborhood for the life of the project.

Hoteling has one built-in weakness. A reserved desk that nobody uses looks taken. The answer is release. In May 2023, Kadence set out five ways to automate flexible workspaces, starting with auto-release: when an employee does not show up for a booking, the desk goes back into the pool. The same announcement covered releasing canceled or unassigned desks from assigned-desk schedules, and automated check-ins with the tap of a badge or a connection to the company Wi-Fi. Automatic check-in produces accurate usage data instead of a record of intentions, and that data shows which areas are underused and whether the layout works.

What is activity-based working?

Activity-based working is a workplace design that replaces the single assigned desk with a range of settings built for different tasks, such as quiet focus rooms, collaborative lounges, project rooms, cafe areas and phone booths. Employees move to the setting that suits the work at hand. It depends on trust and autonomy as much as on furniture.

Activity-based working starts from a different question than desk sharing. Instead of asking where each person sits, it asks what each person is doing at that moment, such as an hour of brainstorming on a couch followed by library silence.

The concept started in the 1980s with Robert Luchetti, an American architect who concluded that an office with different environments for different workday activities would increase productivity. In 1990 he worked with Interpolis, the Dutch insurance company, to create the first activity-based working space. Interpolis gave up assigned desks, let employees choose when, where and for how long they worked, and adopted the motto “As long as the work gets done.” It reduced its office space from two buildings to one.

Typical settings include:

• Individual workspaces, such as shared desks, individual carrels or a single focus room.
• Open lounges and collaborative spaces, from an enclosed room with a whiteboard and movable furniture to open seating in a circle.
• Project rooms, small rooms with video conferencing and a whiteboard.
• Cafe areas with lounge seating, tall tables for quick meetings or banquettes.
• Private rooms and phone booths for confidential meetings and calls.

Furniture is only half the work. Kadence’s December 2024 guide named four elements every activity-based environment needs: the right design, the right stimulation (cues that tell people where to go), awareness (nobody makes noise in the silent room), and learning and development as the organization adjusts. Signage sets expectations, and monitoring how each setting is used shows where to change the mix. The hardest part is leadership mindset: it will not be easy to watch employees chatting in the lounge at 10 am when you are worried about targets.

How do office neighborhoods and team adjacency work?

An office neighborhood is a zone of flexible desks for people who share a team, project, working style or equipment need. Neighborhoods give employees a home base without an assigned desk. Team adjacency decides which neighborhoods sit near each other, placing teams that rely on each other close together so decisions and handoffs move faster.

Kadence’s March 2023 piece on dynamic office neighborhoods defined a neighborhood as a micro-community within the office, designed to bring people together based on shared interests, projects or goals. It described four types:

• Departmental neighborhoods put marketing, sales or engineering together, which suits smaller teams that have not yet moved to cross-functional work.
• Project neighborhoods group people by project, which suits larger companies with a lot of cross-functional work.
• Activity neighborhoods gather people who need the same working conditions, such as deep focus, even if they work on different things.
• Functional neighborhoods serve people who need particular amenities, such as printers, meeting rooms or double monitors. A group of new hires going through onboarding together is another example.

To set them up, identify zones that suit different activities, label areas by their social and functional value, and survey employees about where they feel they belong. Names help too, such as “Numbers Nook” for finance or “Focus Forum” for deep work.

Neighborhoods also need a schedule. In May 2023, Kadence described a weekly scheduler that assigns teams to neighborhoods on set days and releases the zone to anyone on other days. In November 2023, Kadence introduced priority access booking for teams that need space the most. A workplace team chooses a neighborhood, sets how far in advance chosen teams can book, and selects which teams get early access. The announcement cited Slack research finding that 71% of professionals believe working the same hours as their teammates boosts their productivity.

The harder question is which teams should sit near which. Kadence’s October 2025 piece on team adjacency called the cost of separation a hallway tax: teams that rely on each other end up on different floors or in different buildings, and decisions slow down. It cited research at MIT showing that physical proximity boosts collaboration, with teams seated closer together far more likely to co-author papers or file patents. It also pointed to workplaces built around adjacency, including Google’s Bay View campus organized around team neighborhoods, Microsoft’s Redmond campus with adjacent “buddy” zones for teams to expand into, and Airbnb’s 999 Brannan office with sixteen identical neighborhoods of around fifty people each.

The practical starting point is an adjacency matrix:

1. List every team or role.
2. Rate the strength of each relationship on a scale of one to five.
3. Mark whether each pair must, should or cannot sit close.
4. Define neighborhood sizes and plan for overflow.
5. Simulate how those relationships play out across the week.

The same piece set out a 30-day playbook: gather data and rules in week one, model three scenarios in week two (the current layout, an optimized configuration and a project-based co-location setup), pilot one or two neighborhoods in week three, then execute the move and measure the results in week four. Kadence described using SpaceOps to encode these adjacency rules, simulate layouts and generate move plans.

Which flexible office model fits which team?

Match the model to how each group works rather than choosing one for the whole building. Keep assigned space for sensitive or highly structured work, use booked shared desks for variable attendance, activity-based settings for mixed days, and neighborhoods for teams that come in to collaborate. Some organizations also add coworking space outside the headquarters.

• Sensitive work or fixed routines: keep assigned desks or private space, as a deliberate exception rather than the default.
• Variable attendance and independent work: use hoteling, so people have certainty before they travel and auto-release keeps the pool honest.
• Days that mix focus and collaboration: use activity-based settings with clear cues, so each setting is used for its purpose.
• Teams that come in to work together: use office neighborhoods, scheduled team days and priority access, with project neighborhoods for cross-functional work and functional neighborhoods for groups such as new hires.

Distributed employees

Some organizations are rethinking the headquarters itself. In November 2024, Kadence covered how Allstate is breaking free from the cubicle. Allstate, founded in 1931, sold its corporate campus and gave employees access to coworking spaces closer to home. Kadence noted its partnership with LiquidSpace, which gives employees access to thousands of coworking spaces and meeting rooms worldwide, as one way to support flexible office space alongside a core office.

How do you make a flexible office work?

Flexible models work when three things are in place: accurate data on how space is used, rules that automate routine coordination, and enough of the right space on peak days. Smart office design now focuses on coordination between people, not only on building systems, so usage data, employee feedback and booking rules work together.

Kadence’s May 2025 guide on how to design a smart office for hybrid work argued that the challenge is coordination, not only utilization. It described occupancy data drawn from systems organizations already run, such as Wi-Fi, Ethernet, badge access and video conferencing tools, to show how usage varies by day, time and location and to spot underused spaces and overbooked zones. It paired that data with short employee surveys, such as “Why did you choose to come in this week?” and “Did you get what you needed from the office?”, so the numbers come with the reasons behind them. The same data can recommend anchor days based on natural team overlap.

Rules turn that data into behavior. The May 2023 automations included a cap on how many people can book to come on site. In March 2024, Kadence described AI desk booking that responds to conversational requests, suggests when to come in based on when teammates are heading in, and books a desk close to those colleagues. The less coordination people do by hand, the more consistently they use the model.

Then check that supply matches demand. Kadence’s June 2026 piece on why desk numbering won’t fix an adoption problem made the point directly: when peak-day demand outstrips available desks, employees stop trusting the booking system regardless of how well it guides them. Right-sizing means knowing which floors are consistently underused, which space types are in demand, and which desk-to-employee ratios reflect attendance patterns rather than inherited assumptions. Scenario planning lets you model those configurations before committing. The same piece noted that Karger used this approach to reduce its real estate footprint by 80%.

How do you get employees to adopt flexible seating?

Employees adopt flexible seating when they trust why they are asked to book and when the system reduces decisions instead of adding them. Kadence’s customer success team finds that stalled adoption is rarely about desk numbers. Clear neighborhoods, memorable area names and live visibility of where teammates sit matter more than labels.

Many organizations respond to stalled adoption by numbering every desk. The June 2026 piece argued that this solves a small, late problem, because the failure happens earlier, in the employee’s mind. Kelly, a Customer Success Manager at Kadence, put it this way: “Employees worry it’s a way to track office attendance rather than manage space.” That is a trust problem, and no sticker resolves it. Tell people plainly what booking data is for.

The second barrier is cognitive load. Gina, who works with Kadence’s enterprise accounts, said: “Employees are human. They navigate their workplace emotionally, not logistically.” They navigate by where their team sits, where they feel comfortable and where the coffee machine is. The goal is to reduce the number of decisions an employee makes before they sit down.

Identifiers still help, like checking your row and seat at a cinema after booking online. But Kadence’s Utah office runs with no physical desk numbers, and employees find their desks with the app and a clear floor plan. Across large deployments, the highest long-term value comes from live visibility of which spaces are free and where colleagues are sitting.

Build the hierarchy so the desk-level question becomes a small one:

• Give every level a clear identifier: building, floor, neighborhood and desk. When teams have consistent zones, employees are not navigating 200 anonymous desks.
• Use names people remember. An area called “Sunshine” is easier to hold on to than desk 36 in zone C, and a landmark like the large plant by the stairs beats a number.
• Make on-the-spot booking fast. A QR code per desk lets people who book on the fly claim a space in seconds.
• Show teammates before people leave home, so they arrive knowing where their team is.

Get the trust, the interface, the neighborhoods and the space configuration right, and whichever model you choose has a fair chance.