When Maïa Maury, 25, started a new job in the US, she was happy to find that it came with her own assigned desk.
As a French native who’d moved away from home, she wanted to make the space more homey.
“I love having my space, like a little box,” she said of her office cubicle, “some people find it depressing, but I really like having my own space to work.”
After seeing a bunch of TikTok videos of people decorating their desks, she decided to decorate her own and showcase the results on TikTok.
Over $200 later, she had completed her renovation — decking out her office with cushions, an ergonomic mouse, a poster, and an oil diffuser that resembles a firepit. She also bought a desk vacuum to hoover up crumbs from her desk.
She ended up getting nearly 11 million views on the TikTok video.
But Maury is not the only GenZer keen to make themselves at home in the office.
She’s one of many young professionals taking to TikTok under the hashtags #cubiclelife and #worklife to show off their new office setups and share tips on decor. And people seem to love it, with the number of viewers on several videos stretching into the millions.
While an assigned desk used to be a given in an office, the pandemic ushered in an era of hot desking and working from home. For young people, this was their first experience of the corporate world.
Now, cubicles and assigned office desks are more of a novelty, meaning those lucky few who get one are sometimes keen to make the most of it. They’re turning their office desks into a space that more closely resembles a home office set-up, with posters, candles, new equipment, and comfortable blankets.
Trying to make the office less depressing
Instead of resigning themselves to the mundanity of office life, many Gen Z are taking matters into their own hands.
“It is a little depressing to be stuck inside for eight hours plus a day and just stare at a computer screen. And I feel like making it even more depressing by having a bare desk is setting yourself up for failure,” Maury told BI.
Another Gen Zer, Zernab Saeed, wanted to make the most of having a personal office desk in her first job out of college.
She found that having a bland desk contributed to the feeling that office life was “repetitive and mundane.” “I was like, no one knows that this is my desk, and no one stops to have a conversation,” she said.
She did something similar to Maury: bought posters, candles, pillows, and blankets to make the office more comfortable. She added personal touches like a crocheted fake vine made by her friend.
And found that people started stopping by her desk for a chat, and she got to share some more of her personality with her coworkers.
Saeed said she’s one of the more outgoing people at her workplace. “I’m what everyone these days is calling a yapper, so when I see someone new, I go up and talk to them.”
However, as one of the youngest people in the office, she’s found that not everyone is as enthusiastic.
“The older generation, they’re very much to themselves. They keep their personal life and their work life separate,” she said.
Some don’t want to waste time decorating in case they get laid off
When Maury posted her original TikTok video showing how she decorated her desk, she said she received a flood of comments criticizing her for spending so much time and effort on it.
“But what about the layoffs, girl,” one comment read. “Never get this comfortable at a job,” read another.
Maury was shocked at the hostility toward work that many young people felt toward their workplace.
“There was this idea that, apparently, you’re not supposed to like your job?” she said.
“This idea that a job is just a job, it’s here to pay the bills… This is the problem. If this is how you think about a job, then obviously you’re not going to like what you do,” she added.
For her, having her own space is a genuine perk of the job.
Experts say having an assigned desk can reap benefits for young people
In the wake of the pandemic, many companies switched to hybrid working and realized the potential for saving real estate space by introducing hot desking.
But recently, more workplaces are looking at bringing in more assigned desks.
If most people are coming in three days a week, there’s not a significant amount of real estate to be saved by hot desking, Caitlin Turner, director of interiors at architecture firm HOK, explained.
“People have long commutes, and when they arrive, they want to know where they’re going to sit,” she said.
Most employers are concerned about employee attraction and retention — a lot of that comes down to getting people to go into the office and getting mentorship from senior people to their juniors, Turner said.
And some employers are finding that assigned seating is the way to do that, especially when it comes to younger workers.
Gen Zers moving to a new city straight out of college often live in smaller apartments that they share with roommates. So most of them don’t have the resources to have comfortable or even practical work-from-home spaces.
“They’ve been very nomadic,” Turner said of Gen Z. “They’s a generation of the sharing economy: they share bikes and Ubers and all those things.
“So when they’re given their own desk, it’s seen as a perk to them,” she said, versus previous generations like Gen X that took assigned desks as a given.
However, it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach. For some, hot desking means making more serendipitous connections and avoiding getting stuck with unfortunate deskmates.
Many companies are still shifting toward reducing office space, leaving fewer opportunities for people to enjoy having their own desks.
Leonora Georgeoglou, a future-of-work design expert at architecture firm HED, said she expects “one assigned seat for every employee to be a thing of the past.”
Instead, companies are increasingly trying to find a middle ground by providing more enclosed spaces and private offices for dedicated work alongside spaces for hot desking.
