[philpem]

One of my previous employers had an open-plan office, and after a management change introduced mandatory hotdesking. You had to move desks every day -- management checked every morning and wrote people up if they sat at the same desk for two consecutive days.

Then they introduced a mandatory uniform and a complete ban on personal items -- all the Wallace and Gromit coffee mugs, the photos of family disappeared overnight.

It's the most sterile, depersonalising, demotivating work environment I've ever encountered.

Incidentally, BPS covered this in another article... "Why it’s important that employers let staff personalise their workspaces" -- https://digest.bps.org.uk/2015/03/27/why-its-important-that-... . It's well worth a read.

[pwinnski]

Did you work in a Terry Gilliam movie? Was this in the USA? It sounds dystopic.

[philpem]

UK actually. A FTSE-listed company.

I've mentioned some of the other stuff they did in my other comments so I won't dig it up here. I left at the end of last year and at that point I was doing the job of four engineers (who'd all left).

These days, I sleep through the night (first time in about five years), I've massively cut down my coffee intake (from four cups of espresso-strength to a couple of lattes), and I'm working on my own projects in the evenings again. I still have about a stone in weight (put on through comfort-eating) to burn off, but I'm working on that.