Feng Shui Office Desk Setup for a Shared or Corporate Space

What open-plan actually does to your qi

An open-plan office is, from a feng shui point of view, a room with no interior walls, which means every person in it shares the same boundary conditions. That is the problem. A home has a front door and a rear door, so qi has a direction of travel. A shared floor has circulation routes that cut through the middle of the room like wind through a corridor, and the people sitting on those routes are the ones whose work gets interrupted.

Classical feng shui has a term for this kind of force: 穿心煞, a line that passes straight through the centre of a space. In an office the equivalent is the main walkway. Desk rows are usually set perpendicular to it, which means you sit side-on to the flow, get walked past twenty times an hour, and spend the day glancing over your shoulder.

What you can and cannot change

You cannot move a floor plan, the fire exits, the server rack or the printer. You can choose which side of the walkway you sit on, the angle of your desk, whether you have a screen, what is behind your chair, where your monitor faces, and what you keep on the desk. That is a surprisingly large amount of control once you treat it as control rather than as constraint.

The command position in a shared floor

The command position — the best seat in a room, with your back to a wall and a view of the door — is still the goal, and in an open plan it becomes a hierarchy. The person who gets the wall under the window has the command position; the person in the middle of the floor with a walkway behind has the weakest one. That is why desk allocation in a shared office is worth taking seriously, and why, if you have any choice, you should ask for a desk against a partition or a structural wall rather than a free-standing desk in the middle of the floor.

The fallback position

If no desk has a wall behind it, the next best thing is a desk that has a back — a partition, a bookcase, a screen, a plant screen or even a tall storage cabinet. The rule is that qi needs a surface to gather against, and the surface has to be solid enough and close enough to do the work. A row of low cupboards 40 cm behind your chair is a weak back; a full-height bookcase 10 cm behind your head is a strong one.

Screens, partitions and the angle of the desk

If you are going to build your own back, three things matter: height, solidity and position.

• Height. A desk screen sits at roughly 40 to 60 cm above the desk surface, which puts it around eye level for a seated person and blocks both the sightline of the walkway and most of the airflow across your face. Screens taller than about 70 cm start to feel like a wall, and the ones under 30 cm are decorative.
• Solidity. A perforated acoustic screen moves air. An open slatted screen with gaps you can see through does not stop the eye. If your problem is visual interruption, fill the gaps; if your problem is draughts and noise, use a fabric or acoustic panel.
• Position. A screen behind the chair works. A screen to the side protects you from a walkway running alongside your desk, which is a different fault and needs a different fix.

The angled desk

Turning the desk 30 to 45 degrees so that a corner points towards the door is the classic remedy for a desk that faces straight into the entrance. It breaks the direct line of sight and the direct line of qi, and it also stops the doorway from sitting in the centre of your vision all day. Almost every desk in a traditional office is set at an angle for this reason, long before open-plan offices existed.

Light, glare and the window

Light is the element that most affects how an open-plan desk feels, and the window is the biggest variable in the room.

The three options, in order of preference: a window to your side, giving you daylight without a glare source; a window behind you, which lights the desk but puts a bright rectangle in your peripheral vision all day and often makes the screen harder to read; and a window directly in front, which is the worst case for anyone who spends hours looking at a monitor, because the eye continually tries to focus between the bright window and the dark screen. If your desk faces a window, angle the monitor so it sits at 90 degrees to it and drop a blind to about 30 per cent rather than fully closing it.

Overheads and ducting

Check what is directly above you. A ceiling light panel, a duct run or a sprinkler pipe on the centre line of your desk is the modern version of a beam overhead, which classical feng shui treats as a constant downward pressure. Where you can, move to a different bay; where you cannot, keep a light-toned surface directly over the desk and never store anything heavy in the overhead space above you.

Claiming territory in a space you do not own

Three items that define your space

Personalising a shared desk is a feng shui act as much as a decorating one. The principle is that an area with no defined boundary has no defined qi, so it gets used by everyone and supports no one. Three items do most of the work.

A plant. One living plant on the desk or on the floor behind you introduces the wood element, softens the desk and marks it as yours. It also does the practical job of breaking the sightline of anyone walking past. Choose a plant that survives low light and occasional neglect — a pothos, a snake plant or a ZZ plant is far better than something that will be dead in a fortnight. A dead plant is worse than no plant, and there is a separate guide to the tropical plants that work best indoors.

One personal object. A photograph, a plant, a small figure, a book. One, not five — a cluster of personal items on a shared desk makes the space look cluttered to everyone else, and clutter is the most common complaint about open-plan floors.

A small rug or mat. A 90 by 150 cm mat under the chair defines a zone, softens noise underfoot and stops the desk feeling like it is floating in the middle of a room.

Numbers for a shared desk

Measurements help because they convert a vague wish into a specific purchase. These are the figures most often recommended for shared and corporate desks.

• Screen height: 40 to 60 cm above the desk, topping out around 150 cm from the floor for a seated eye height of about 120 cm.
• Clear space behind the chair: 90 cm minimum for a walkway, 120 cm if a colleague needs to pass behind you regularly, 150 cm where there is a main circulation route.
• Desk footprint for two facing workstations: 1.5 m wide by 1.2 m deep minimum, with 1.2 m between desk edges.
• Desk to screen distance: 60 to 75 cm from the eye to the monitor, with the top of the screen at or just below eye level.
• Walkway to desk edge: at least 60 cm of clear floor so chairs roll back without hitting anything.
• Plant behind the chair: 45 to 60 cm clear of the screen, so it screens without blocking the light.

Also worth checking

Wherever you sit, take a photo of the view from your chair on a normal working day. Most open-plan discomfort turns out to be one specific object in that frame — a flickering light, a bin, a whiteboard, a door that opens towards you. Move the chair or the object, and the room improves for everyone around you.

A practical audit for your own desk

Run through these in order at your desk this week.

1. Sit down and note what is directly behind your head. If it is a walkway or open floor, that is the fault to fix first.
2. Turn to look at the entrance from your chair. Can you see it? If the doorway sits dead centre in your view every time you look up, angle the desk.
3. Check the window. Side is best, behind is workable, straight ahead is the problem.
4. Look up. Anything heavy, noisy or low-hanging on your centre line?
5. Clear the desk of everything that is not part of the work, and put one personal object and one plant in place.

None of this makes a badly planned open-plan floor good. If the room has no walls, no usable windows and no acoustic strategy, individual desk fixes will only take you so far — but they will take you a long way, and unlike a workplace redesign they cost nothing and you can do them on Monday morning. The cashier desk guide covers the same back-to-the-wall principle applied to a position you own outright.

And a note on the bigger room

None of this makes a badly planned open-plan floor good.