If you're like my old boss, just tell the employees to assemble their own desks, and then wonder why all these developers who requested a standing desk, are still using their old sit down desks.
I'd be happy to assemble all of my office furniture if my company paid for it -- though paying $100+/hour engineers to do the work of a $15+ handyman seems like a bad deal for the company - especially when the guy that assembles desks all day will do it faster (and correctly).
We did exactly this where I'm an expensive consultant. The one who assembled his table the fastest won a prize.
My workplace might be a little different but we also are responsible for moving the dishes in and out of the dishwasher. I'm happy to do it.
Tongue-in-cheek/devil's advocate reply: I wouldn't necessarily consider building furniture a very safe team building excercise, it may just have the opposite result ;-)
I'd be happy to manage my own desk procurement, including organizing the delivery and assembly, if my employer wanted to pay me for it - that's still paying an engineer for administrative work, but maybe less of it at least.
A former boss of mine told the employees to assemble the furniture at the new location. It was fast and it looked good.
After a week the monitors started to fail, because the cable to the monitor was too tight, so when they moved the monitor, the contact on the back of the monitor broke.
Ha, at my partner's work(large IT company in UK) they are not even allowed to move or adjust the height of their own desks, because it's a health and safety violation and if anything happened to them doing it the insurance wouldn't cover them. I think HR would get a heart attack at the thought of employees assembling their own desks.
Yea i always found this funny. I was not allowed to move a monitor in the office, but was racking 4u servers by myself in the datacenter. When i asked they claimed it was because the insurance for the monitor, not me, would not be covered if it was not the local IT guy who moved it.
