How to Choose the Best Desk Booking System for a Hybrid Workplace: 10 Factors to Consider
Benefits of a Desk Booking System
Employees prefer to know where they’re sitting. Whether it’s a hot desk arrangement or a seating plan, letting others know who’s in and when is a great incentive to encourage employees into the office.
Here are some of the other benefits of using a desk booking system, especially for hybrid workspaces:
Keep Track of Desk Usage and Occupancy Levels
The overall function of a desk booking system is to simply help keep track of desk availability and who is occupying certain desks.
In just a few clicks, those running an office can receive data insights on desk usage, view who’s booked in on any given day, or, for hot desks, find out which spaces are most popular.
Keeping track of desk usage enables businesses to find out who’s booking in and when, and to stay on top of any safeguarding as more employees return to the office.
Improve Space Utilization
There are two sides to space utilization:
- Where are people sat when they are in the office?
- How much of your office space is actually being used?
The former is particularly important if you have a variety of workstations available. Maybe you have sofas, standing desks, and monitors.
Finding out where people are booking in the most can help with decision-making when it comes to improving your office space and encouraging employees in.
The latter concerns offices which remain at reduced capacity after the pandemic. Where you may have previously had 80 people in your office on any given day, the option to work from home may mean this number is significantly reduced.
In both cases, understanding the space you occupy and how employees use it is a cost-effective way to manage your hybrid workplace.
Monitor Trends in Office Attendance
Most desk booking systems should offer users data insights into their employees’ data booking activity.
Data on how people are using the office, including the most popular attendance days, individual attendance increasing or decreasing, and the frequency of office bookings, are all vital for understanding how office attendance impacts your business.
Trends help to understand when and why employees are coming into the office, and provide office managers with the opportunity to ask questions about work culture if attendance drops off.
Help Transition to a Hybrid Workspace Model
A desk booking system is most effective when businesses are divided between the office and home.
Over 46% of people have experienced loneliness when working from home, so attending the office when other people are guaranteed to be in is a great incentive to encourage the use of the desk booking system.
If teams can see who’s in and when, they can arrange meetings and social events based on high attendance rates. Businesses embracing a hybrid workplace will find organizing their space much easier with transparency over attendance.
