My company uses a very simple system. Each team gets assigned an area that only they can book. For example a team of 15 people get a cluster of 10 desks. That solves it.

My company uses an even simpler system. Each team of 15 people gets assigned 15 desks.

But that's less efficient than 10 desks for 15 people!

Is it?

Of course, neither of us nor the company really has hard knowledge of what is "more efficient", because despite being entirely driven by profit metrics and A/B testing there is still no real way to measure productivity for knowledge workers. And even if there was, employee misery wouldn't be part of the metric unless it measurably affected retention.

But that in turn is less efficient than 0 desks for 15 people.

Thinking about it, why stop there? Negative desking is the future. A team of 15 could have -15 desks (or less, if they are high performers). Super efficient.

I hope that no CEO reads your comment otherwise all the guys that have mandatory RTO are screwed XD

The most common implementation for negative desking is having everyone working from home

That's just zerodesking. For negative desking the team has to turn their hotdesking area into a wework.

I’m envisioning carnival barkers trying to get other teams to use up their -15 seats as if they don’t sell out they have to pay the company a rental fee.

Works if people aren’t coming in every day. We have set days where certain teams come in. You’ll be sitting next to the people you work with and the company doesn’t need as many desks

but they cram them in like factory chickens

What does it solve though? If the purpose of RTO is being together with your team, and you don't have enough desks to bring the team in the office at the same time, this solves basically nothing.

Hybrid working. Everyone has certain days that they work from home.

The company I work does hot-desking, but it is implicitly also divided into groupings. All the people in each team sit in the same part of the office each day and hotdesk within that group of desks. There are maybe 1 time in 50 that I show up and there are no desks free in my teams part of the office.

One other potential advantage with hot-desking is that you can have different zones with different rules. Working on a project where you need to talk with your colleague a lot during the day, sit in the 'talking' zone. Need to be left alone in silence for 8 hours straight, move to the 'quite' zone.