The death of office desk booking?
To coordinate the new hybrid work environment, desk booking software has been promoted as a solution, as it allows employees to reserve office desks and rooms only when they are needed. But do your employees really need desk booking to return back to the office? Most often, no. They need a framework to collaborate and work better together.
All is not well in the desk booking market
Based on the customer feedback Steerpath started receiving more than a year ago, we realized that something was missing from the office desk booking i.e. hoteling concept v1.0.
First, the market was telling us that the number one reason for anyone to work at the office was to - collaborate with other team members. Yes, obviously, why else would you come to the office?
The focus, therefore, of any practical employee tool should be on helping employees to address the following two questions:
When are the other team members planning to be at the office?
Is there a workspace available when I plan to show up?
Many desk booking systems on the market today are missing the mark by focusing on remote workspace reservation and neglecting the team collaboration function. Often these booking tools are also overly complex and will make it difficult to shuffle your desk location when you are at the office.
The next epiphany was that the employees working in a hybrid work environment simply do not care what exact desk they use when they are in the office - as long as the right colleagues are there at the same time. So, why would they have to spend time using a complex desk booking system?
For those workers, who DO care at what desk they sit, the tendency is to keep booking that same desk every time. In that case, the desk has become an “assigned desk”. And if they do not get to sit at that specific desk, they may rather not come to the office at all. Yes, really. All this is of course counter to the flexible seating philosophy with un-assigned desks.
So, then the question was, why not forget the desk booking concept, for good, and just use hot desking? With hot desking, you can show up at the office and grab any un-assigned desk that is free, first come first served, without booking it.
Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.
How to manage office capacity?
Most employees would welcome the hot desking method. It offers maximum freedom with no complex reservation tools required. The challenge then becomes how to manage the office capacity based on demand, given that there are more workers and desks. How would the company make sure there are enough desks for all workers during the day? And how would the worker know that there is a desk available when she’s planning to go to the office?
With today’s booking /hoteling apps, managing the workspace capacity can be difficult. Adding or removing desks from the plan quickly is not always an easy task and often requires the IT department to schedule time for back-office re-configuration work.
With the most basic hot desking approach, on the other hand, there is no need for any digital booking solution app, so it’s really simple, but also there is no way to manage the capacity.
The Better Way - Capacity Booking
At Steerpath we finally agreed that the new better way is a combination of hot desking with added features for collaboration and capacity management. Our customers agreed. And so, the Steerpath MyTeam tool was born. Now focusing on reserving workspace CAPACITY instead of specific desks.
With MyTeam capacity booking app, you don’t reserve a desk. Instead, you notify your team members about the days in the week you will be working at any specific WORKSPACE AREA - building, floor, department, or office neighborhood. MyTeam app will then reserve workspace capacity for you in that space. And when you arrive, you can grab any free desk, just like hot desking. Each workspace location has a max worker capacity status displayed as just one number. That is easy to change in the system when the available desks and offices are changed or repurposed.
Steerpath MyTeam – How Does It Work?
With these simple steps, by using the MyTeam feature, you can synchronize your time at the office with your team, and reserve workspace capacity so that you will have a desk when you arrive.
With MyTeam weekly plan calendar view, you first make sure that your team members are going to be in the office there on the same day. You can see the weekly plans (office vs. remote) of all those colleagues you have selected in your team.
On that same view you will next check if the specific workspace you have selected has available desk capacity, as it’s displayed next to each workspace area (available#/taken#).
Then you just confirm your selection so that your team can also see your plan. When you arrive, you know that your team members are there and there is space available for you.
What do hybrid workers need - for best productivity, freedom, and collaboration?
During this process, in developing a new and better-accepted solution, the Steerpath product team came to realize that sometimes the product evolution toward the market best practice does not mean adding more features - but instead taking a step back and reducing complexity.
And yet, you can still book desks with the Steerpath Smart Office platform, if that is what your organization wants. But with the MyTeam introduction, using the new capacity booking method, we believe that we also now have what your employees actually need.
To learn more about Steerpath Smart Office solutions and the Hybrid Workplace App with MyTeam, please visit https://steerpath.com.