What is Desk Booking Software and how to implement it for your hybrid office?
What is a desk booking system?
The provision of shared, bookable workstations and desks around the company is known as desk booking. A typical desk booking system can use any combination of hot desks, hoteling desks, free addressing desks, activity-based workspaces, and office neighbourhoods to provide every employee with the seating they require while saving time and money, improving space utilization, and enhancing the employee experience. This approach is ideal for supporting flexible work, agile working, and hybrid work schedules. Desk booking has grown in importance as a component of a hybrid workplace approach in the age of flexible work.
How do you implement a desk reservation system?
Today, hot desking and office hoteling are two of the most popular desk booking techniques. Although they are similar, hot desking allocates seats to employees as needed, doing away with the necessity for everyone to have a permanent desk. Office hoteling allows employees to reserve a workstation for a predetermined period of time. If your business is thinking about employing one of these tactics, you must first decide whether it is indeed a good fit for flexible seating. There are indications that it would be a good fit for your business, such as:
- Your staff is primarily mobile.
- Your company is made up of consultants, a sporadic sales staff, or contractors that only work part-time in the office.
- The layout of your workspace is adaptable.
- You have locations in several cities.
- You want to reduce square footage to reduce facility rental costs.
- You want to draw in a flexible, modern workforce, and you’re interested in enhancing cross-departmental collaboration.
If this describes your company, you must create a clear plan for the next actions. It will be necessary to prepare the office space for this new work environment and train the personnel on new procedures (such as booking desks through mobile apps). Before you formally implement the new policy, you will need to address everything from flexible seating and meeting spaces to the administration of a desk booking program
Working collaboratively with your organization’s HR and IT teams is one of the most crucial components of any implementation plan. It’s critical that HR is on board to support staff in adjusting to this change because a shift to a desk booking arrangement involves changing employee work habits just as much as it does the actual physical layout of an office. It’s crucial that the new strategy’s execution doesn’t result in a decrease in productivity or efficiency, regardless of the initial cause (financial, cultural, or physical); in fact, it’s probable that the management will be seeking efficiency increases.
In order for the approach to be successful, FMs (Facility Management) must work with HR to comprehend how workers work and how to enhance office communication and processes. Similar to this, integrating IT is essential for a successful rollout because any new plan will require technological improvements that must be put into place, monitored, and evaluated. Since IT will always be the organization’s gatekeeper for technology, contacting them early on enables them to express any red flags they have early on to prevent your project from getting derailed.
Furthermore, the success or failure of hot desking and office hoteling is significantly influenced by the corporate culture of a firm. For instance, it is much more likely that a company will successfully implement any of these desk booking apps if it provides employees with enough freedom to achieve their workplace goals.
FMs must choose which desk reservation app to invest in in addition to these crucial factors. This choice will affect how quickly and effectively your policy is embraced throughout your organization.
The following are some qualities to look for in a desk booking solution:
- A focus on user experience and straightforward adoption
- Reporting and data in real-time
- Cloud-based technology
- All members of your team will provide committed customer support
It’s crucial to remember that planning continues even after the necessary software is installed and your office space has been made desk booking-friendly. You must collect feedback and evaluate the outcomes of your new approach to make sure your team is genuinely gaining from it if you want to maintain efficiency.
The benefits that you will enjoy
Here are the advantages of desk reservation software that are available to businesses of all sizes, from time and cost savings to improved work-life balance for employees.
Save Time
Desk booking can facilitate the rapid and simple discovery, booking, and check-in of desks for employees when used in conjunction with the appropriate desk booking app. Team members can also save time depending on the kind of bookable desks utilized at work; for instance, self-service desks don’t need permission to be reserved, which can free up facilities staff to concentrate on other crucial activities.
Cost reductions
Does your company have a mobile workforce, a flexible facility, and the resources to make the desk booking app effective? If so, purchasing a desk booking system might be a terrific method to reduce idling facility expenditures since having fewer internal employees gives room for downsizing. Then, you can put these savings to use in places where they’ll really matter, maximizing the value of your desk booking strategy for your company.
Contact tracing and social distancing
Bookable hot desks can promote social distancing and contact tracing whenever it’s necessary for the workplace—now or in the future, as demands change—by enabling facility managers to know who’s seated where.
Detailed insights into desk usage.
Employee access to shared workstations isn’t the only benefit of bookable desks. By carefully monitoring how workers use their workstations, FMs may also evaluate desk utilization and office capacity, analyze adoption rates, identify trends and seating preferences, estimate desk demands, and enhance allocation
Office adaptability
Whether a firm aspires for a full transition to hybrid work, a full return to the office, or something in between, it can stay flexible and support any changes in employee seating needs by implementing desk reservation software.
A desk reservation system could not only save your company time and money but also help you and your team, meaning that you will spend less time looking for a desk to use when you have a project to deliver. This system can save you valuable office space as, rather than keeping all desks free for whichever employees need them, individuals or teams can reserve desks as needed and come and go as needed. Seamlessly coordinate the internal operations of your company, streamline the way your employees work, and make important business information easily accessible for everyone. If you want your employees to use one task management system, you need to implement a desk booking system that is easy to use and boosts collaboration in the workplace
Quickly adaptable to any type of workplace
Perhaps the most important element to consider when picking desk reservation software is the ease of configuration. An off-the-shelf solution may initially save you some money but you’ll spend a lot of time and money trying to get it to perform the way you need it to, usually to no avail. A tool that can be fully customised, on the other hand, will provide a considerably more impressive return on investment because it can be set up from the start to match the unique needs of your company.
Neoffice software enables a variety of work settings, including business and healthcare settings. To accommodate all working styles, the system includes hot, fixed, and flexible customizable desk kinds.
Neoffice desk booking software
With the Neoffice desk booking system, you can find and book your preferred desk on our interactive floor plan which replicates your actual design in the office. Neoffice is the only hybrid workplace software solution which offers solutions to every use case for seat planning. You can schedule employees to seat, create seating rosters, and do hot desking or hoteling.
Neoffice is built with a suite of workspace tools that help employees choose how and where they work while providing organizations with a platform to manage their hybrid workplace with ease and complete control.
The solution comes with 9 features on one single app – Team planner to manage a collaborative effort for a team, Seat Scheduling, Meeting room Booking, Hot Desking, Car park Slot Booking, Digital cafeteria to pre-order your meals at work, Employee commute solution, Survey forms. All Features are modular and the client can choose to subscribe to the relevant solution.
To know more about the solution, do drop a mail to [email protected]
Neoffice is the only hybrid software solution which offers all facilities which an employee needs to pre-book before coming to the office all on one single interface. Available as a mobile app and web app.
