Working in Shared Spaces

You arrive at work, coffee in hand, laptop tucked under your arm, ready to conquer the day. It’s your day to be in the office instead of at your desk at home. It’s nice to see your colleagues and feel a familiar routine, but not everything is the same as it used to be.

You don’t have your own space anymore. You have a desk to work at, but it’s today’s desk (not your desk). The only way you can control whether you sit near the window is to get to the office very early! And sometimes, the person who had the desk yesterday didn’t clean it up, didn’t get rid of the sticky notes on the monitor, and you hope they weren’t sick and coughed all over everything!

Welcome to the hybrid workplace.

It’s not what many of us are used to. We used to have our own space, monitors, filing cabinets, a chair, and our secret drawer for all the treats! The new hybrid workplace has changed all of that, and we now have to make reservations, hoteling systems, shared workstations, and “choose your own adventure” seating arrangements.

Which raises an interesting question. If your workspace changes every day, what message are you sending, and what impacts that message?

Years ago, I wrote an article about judging ourselves by the state of our desks. Back then, the advice was simple: clean it up. Organize the piles. Hide the mess. Make your desk look like it belongs to someone who has their act together.

Our workplace has changed, but that principle hasn’t. Today, your professionalism is reflected less by what’s on your desk and more by how you leave the space, how you prepare the space, and how you function within it.

Whether it’s your permanent desk, a borrowed cubicle, a shared touchdown station, or the corner table in a collaborative workspace, people still notice. And yes, we still judge each other on our working space.

If you sit down at a shared desk and leave behind coffee rings, tangled cords, abandoned notes, and a mysterious granola bar wrapper, that says something. None of it says, “Here is a highly competent professional people can trust.” It says, “Chaos was here.”

I like order. My mother believed that a clean home was next to godliness, professionalism, and, probably, proper ironing technique. To this day, I cannot fold a fitted sheet without hearing her voice in my head.

And yet, give me a busy week, three deadlines, four presentations, and seventeen browser tabs open, and suddenly my workspace starts looking like a crime scene investigation. I’m human, and it happens. My desk is not always the way it should be, even though I like order. And, I’ll be at the same space the next day, and the only person who sees this chaos is Warren.

But in a shared-space world, clutter is no longer just your problem. It becomes everyone’s problem. Which means workspace professionalism has evolved. It’s no longer about decorating your desk to reflect your personality with family photos and your favourite mug. It’s about being portable, intentional, and respectful.

Here are a few modern workspace rules worth following:

Travel light
If your office setup requires three bags, two sweaters, a desk lamp, and enough snacks to survive a minor apocalypse, it may be time to simplify.

Leave no trace
Think of yourself as a workplace camper. Pack in what you need. Pack it back out when you leave.

Create a mobile system
Use digital files, portable organizers, and streamlined supplies so you can set up quickly and work efficiently wherever you land.

Reset the space when you’re done
Wipe the desk with a sanitized wipe. Tuck in the chair. Remove your notes. Close your tabs if you’re on a shared computer. Leave it better than you found it. That’s not just courtesy. That’s professionalism.

In hybrid work, your digital workspace matters just as much. If your desktop screen is covered in random files named “Final_Version_3_ACTUAL_FINAL,” we may need to have a conversation.

Your physical desk may be temporary. Your systems should not be. At the end of the day, your workspace should support your effectiveness, not advertise your overwhelm.

Busy is still good. Frazzled is still not what you want others to think when your name comes up.

Whether you work from home, in the office, or from a different desk every single day, the question is still the same: If someone looked at your workspace right now, what would they assume about the person working there?

And more importantly…

Would they be right?