The modern workplace is evolving at a rapid pace, with new trends like telecommuting and flexible work rising in popularity. Needless to say, workplace optimization is going to play an integral role in ensuring optimum levels of productivity and collaboration in the workplace in the coming years.
However, here’s the bottom line: not every organization is ready for the change. To keep up with the new trends, you’ll have to overcome the growing complexities of the workplace. And a desk booking solution is a great place to kickstart workplace transformation.
To begin with, a desk booking solution ensures that all employees have access to the real-time desk usage of your workplace. So, having such a tool at your disposal is a great way to add order to your workplace. Moreover, it also opens room for experimentation like new desking configurations, methodologies, and avenues to reduce error.
Let’s explore desk booking system, how they work, and their various benefits in detail.
How does the Desk Booking Solution Work?
A desk booking solution is like any other software solution. It has a user-facing side and another employer-facing one.
The user-facing side is where all the interaction happens. For instance, if you need a desk for the day, you can pull up the booking portal and browse for available desks. On finding one, you can reserve it for any desired time. The same goes for all your colleagues.
This way, the desk booking solution maintains the occupancy data of all the available seats, while ensuring that there’s no discord between the employees regarding the seating.
Over on the employer-facing side, facility managers can gather data using the desk booking solution to understand the booking patterns of their employees. They can use the data to evaluate employee expectations, needs, and wants. So, if your workplace has a type of seating arrangement that is more favored than others, say cubicles over regular desks, you can increase the number of popular seating types accordingly.
To help you understand how an on-demand, first-come-first-serve desk booking solution can help you transform your workplace, let’s look at some scenarios.
1. If You Want to Save More Time
In workplaces, especially in the US, there’s a considerable amount of time wasted by employees looking for a suitable working space. Regardless of your headcount, this number can rack up quite a bit, until it starts affecting your productivity. Even 5 minutes spent by an employee every day on finding a seat can snowball into a frightening number of wasted hours.
A desk booking solution helps you prevent that. With it, everyone in your office knows which seats are open and for how long. Employees can then accommodate themselves accordingly, rather than spending precious office hours trying to find a working space.
2. If You’re Facing Space Management Issues
The importance of optimum space utilization cannot be understated. Every year, thousands of organizations spend at least 30-50% more on real estate than they should have, resulting in redundant space. Though they cite possible future expansion as the reason for an oversized office, things don’t always work out that way, costing companies hundreds of thousands of dollars.
However, with a meeting room and desk booking solution, you can ensure better space utilization in a smaller space, eliminating the need to spend more on extra square footage. Moreover, every office has a desk or space that goes unused. With a desk booking solution, you can encourage better usage of this. After all, if an employee finds their favorite space occupied, they might give the left-over space a chance.
In short, a desk booking solution facilitates enhanced employee accommodation and efficient use of available space.
3. If You Can’t Fulfill the Occupancy Compliance
In this new era of social distancing, facility managers now have to take into account the new physical distancing norms in place when thinking about space optimization. Tasks like rearranging rooms, revising floor plans, and planning for new occupancies have been added to their to-do list.
As you might have guessed, a desk booking solution can significantly simplify this process and improve the overall results. For instance, you can now limit occupancy in office areas that tend to be more crowded, like the break room. To maintain physical distancing throughout your workplace, you can also use the desk booking solution to mark certain desks or spaces as off-limits.
Moreover, you can also program the app to display reminders and warnings whenever an employee tries to book an out-of-bounds space. Or, you can disable booking for such desks altogether. The power is in your hands!
4. If You Want to Minimize Interruptions
Imagine trying to get all your tasks done, only to be interrupted repeatedly by your colleagues, asking you when the desk would be free. Surely, you won’t be able to complete the assigned work, or get frustrated real fast due to the constant interference.
You can avoid these kinds of interruptions with a dedicated desk booking solution. As mentioned, such a solution displays the current occupancy of a space, and how long it’ll be occupied for. So, if an employee wants to know about the desk usage, they can simply log in to the solution rather than visit you on your desk.
5. If You Wish to Relocate
Relocating can be a bit of a hassle, and even more so if you have poor space management in your current office. When you don’t know the usage statistics of your current workplace, anticipating the meeting room and desk needs of your new office can be challenging.
However, with a desk booking solution, you’ll have the necessary data to visualize the space needs of your new workplace, enabling efficient use of square footage.
In Closing
It can be fairly challenging to find the right solution for the evolving workplaces of today. But with a desk booking solution in your arsenal, you can effortlessly achieve a greater degree of collaboration, flexibility, and agility in your workplace.
Moreover, you can also encourage uniformity in the workplace, since everyone is subject to the same booking process and guidelines.
So, invest in a desk booking solution today and bring order to your workplace.
WorkInSync is a leading hybrid workplace solution. It offers features like hot desking, desk hoteling, and real time office space utilization. It is a user-friendly mobile app that allows employees to reserve and book a desk. Even if you are implementing a hybrid work model, it will allow you to use your space efficiently.
