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Agreed by the Department’s Space Management Working Group and its Senior Management Committee, Michaelmas Term 2019

Desk allocation is overseen by the Head of Administration, but managed at the group level by your Group Lead. Should you have questions about desk space for your group – including, for example, in the case of planned recruitments – you should in the first instance raise these with your Group Lead.

The Department’s space principles are set out in full in this document (on Sharepoint) and can be summarised as follows:

Underpinning principles

  • The Head of Administration will allocate desks to groups via the Group Lead on the basis of a ratio of up to 9 desks to every 10 employees. This is based on the space audit data, showing that few groups use their desks more than 90% of the time.
    • Teams will continue to be based in an agreed office or offices, and will use the pool of desks allocated to them in a flexible manner with the aim of ensuring all employees can access a desk in their team’s pool when required. Group Leads are asked to ensure that, wherever possible, staff are allocated a primary desk on the understanding that, when required, they may be expected to use an alternative desk while their primary desk is in use by someone else (for example when a staff member attends office on a day that they are not usually there).
    • Shared space should be provided to post-graduate students in line with the University’s space policy. An appropriate ratio, which will be lower than the ratio for staff, will be discussed with the student body in the first instance. The DGS will lead this discussion with the support of the Space Management Working Group as necessary.
    • People wishing to use departmental space who are neither employees nor students (e.g. academic visitors) are asked either to agree with the relevant Group Lead that they may use a desk from within the group’s pool, or to use the Library in RPC.

Changes to desk allocation

  • Any research or administrative team seeking to increase its desk allocation due to incremental change, or to change its allocation in such a way as to impact on other teams, should first discuss this internally, Group Lead to Group Lead, and then raise with the Head of Administration if informal arrangements are not possible. Re-organisation within groups which does not impact on any other group should be managed by the Group Lead.
  • Any team submitting a large centre or similar grant likely to involve a significant increase in staff numbers should raise this with the Head of Department and Head of Administration with plenty of notice at the time of application.

Hot desks

  • A minimum number of desks will be allocated to hot desking, i.e. not to any team in particular. This will include, but not be limited to, desks in the Library area of Radcliffe Primary Care. The Space Group recommends that, as a minimum, 10 desks are provided for every 100 employees and that these are distributed throughout departmental buildings insofar as that is possible.

Management and review

  • The Head of Administration will provide a marked up floorplan of each Group’s allocated desks to the Group Lead.
  • A Group Lead may nominate a member of their team to act as the point of contact for desk allocation but, if so, they must empower their nominee to act as decision-maker for the group.
  • It is expected that the changes arising from the above principles should have a minimal impact on most teams in the first instance at least.
  • The operation of these principles should be kept under review. Specifically, if not undertaken ahead of this date, a full review will be undertaken one year after implementation (Michaelmas Term 2020) and the results reported to the Space Management Working Group and the Senior Management Committee.