> No designated desks

We had an office where they tried this as an experiment. Each desk was sit-stand, had one or two 24inch monitors, a chromebox + mouse + keyboard, plenty of wall sockets easily accessible at the top of the desk and powered-USB port for charging etc. People either plugged their laptop in, or just logged in on the chromebox and were away.

And it was awful.

* People started to have "their" desk where they "always" sit, and left things like coats on the chair, running shoes under the desk, folding bikes (you name it) at the desk. This had the effect of taking the desk "out of circulation" meaning when the "usual" occupier wasn't there for a day people still didn't use the desk, or someone did use it but the usual occupier came in late and someone else was there it was a super-awkward moment of either the first person packing up and moving elsewhere, or the usual occupant getting in a huff with someone in "their desk" and/or continually interrupting the other person when they come over to collect their notebook or headphones or something.

* There were less desks than people. 90% of the time this was fine as usually enough people were on vacation/at clients/on training etc. Occasionally though it meant there was no space and people roamed the office for 15 minutes before having to go and work from Starbucks (if they had brought their laptop with them)

* If you were at meetings or otherwise away from your desk, you would often come back to your desk to find that someone else was now sat at the desk you were sitting at before.

* Even if you found a desk, you were often not near your team. Cue constant "Where are you sitting?" instant messages and people wandering around trying to find each other.

* Desks often had missing cables and stuff - so even if you did get a desk sometimes it was on that one desk where the monitors dont work, or someone had taken the power cable, or the keyboard had a "sticky H key" or something. Because no one "owned" the desks, no one bothered to report the faults to the people managing the facilities and just moved to another desk or stole the cable/keyboard/mouse/whatever from another nearby desk.

* Engineers could not use desktops (since they would have to move them every day, and company policy is no source code stored on laptops) so the computers got given a fixed location, and the nomad engineers had to find a desk to remote desktop into the desktop each day. This is fine for short periods, but day-in, day-out 8+ hours a day looking at remote desktops leads to sea-sickness due to the small lag. So even if the receptionist or admins or spreadsheet jockeys could go and sit in the cool-zones for their work, the engineers were stuck at a dekstop because they need the monitors and stuff to do their job.

After about 9 months or so we moved to a different building due to growing out of the experimental building and went back to assigned-desks in an open plan office which was hugely improved.

Please, for anyone reading this, please please please do not instigate non-designated desks for your workers.

tl;dr - non-designed desks had all of the same problems as an open office, but with extra additional micro-stresses every day that really add up over time to make your working day a misery.