How Smarter Desk Booking is Supporting the Hybrid Workplace
In many ways, people and technology are driving changes in the workplace.
Employees want more choice about where, when and how they work. Smart solutions are helping organisations to find ways of making that possible – now and in the future.
A sensible place to start for facilities managers and other decision-makers is desk booking.
Here’s why.
Understanding Office Use
A big topic of conversation in business at the moment is the return to work and how organisations are going to deal with that.
Central to that conversation is the ability for organisations to understand what’s happening in their office.
Organisations are going to give people the opportunity to return to the office or the opportunity to work from home, perhaps on a flexible basis. It’s very much looking like many leaders, managers and teams will be working with a hybrid model.
It’s one thing to say, “This is our policy or this is our working model now”. It’s another thing to understand what that means in day-today practice.
Organisations need to understand what is happening. Who is going to come into the office on a regular basis? How long did they stay for? What sorts of meeting rooms did they use? How often are visitors coming in?
If an organisation can gather that information and start to understand what it means, it will help them to determine what action to take around the workspace and facilities.
The information can help leaders make better decisions around what to do with their meeting rooms, their office layout, the quantity of desks they have and, perhaps, other experiences inside the office.
To do this requires data. Which means organisations need a way to gather and analyse data.
Smarter Desk Booking
Gathering and analysing data on office and meeting room space can be achieved through a smart and integrated desk booking solution.
A solution like GoBright, for example, supports all of that activity – one’s ability to book a desk, and so on, and then read the data in the background. And technology is advancing all the time.
GoBright is an illustration of that development. GoBright now has the ability to pull that data into a powerful tool like Power BI, so it can provide an organisation with regular and accessible data to show a picture of exactly what’s happening.
That ability has become even more important to businesses today. It means they can then start to make much better decisions about how they set up their office for the best possible use.
GoBright in Action
At Ascentae, we spend a lot of time talking to businesses and establishments, to understand their ambitions and their challenges around hybrid working.
A key talking point we have been hearing surrounding the return to the workplace is that organisations want to provide employees with the flexibility to book a desk and feel reassured that they have somewhere they can work from in the office… And this was supported further by conversations we had at ISE 2022.
In this video, our Sales Director John Vickerage provides a quick demonstration of how GoBright makes desk booking fast and simple.
The deployment of workplace technology must fundamentally be about adding value. Does it make things easier for employees? Does it help employees to do tasks more quickly and efficiently? Does it enable data collection and analysis to support better, data-driven decision-making?
GoBright keeps it simple.
If an employee wants to book a desk in the office on a specific day, they can view a map on screen (on their computer, laptop, tablet device or smartphone): it shows what’s available, who’s in that day and time, and who is sitting where.
Desks marked red are already booked. Green ones are free. The employee can click and book a desk – for themselves or someone else. If they have a meeting or just want to catch up with a colleague, they can book a desk near to them.
It’s also possible with GoBright to book desk space for teams – for a meeting, training session or in-person collaboration on a project. Everyone booked a desk gets sent a notification of the details.
Supporting Return to Work and Hybrid Working
Smarter desk booking solutions help organisations make the return to work and hybrid working happen.
It’s not just a matter of giving their employees the flexibility to book a desk and being certain they have somewhere to go in the office.
Organisations are asking questions to improve the office experience. They’re interested to know what sorts of things might drive people to come back to the office.
Will it be the working experience? Could it be having better access to better technology? Could it be a small detail, like using a sit stand desk rather than a traditional desk, which they may not have at home?
Smart desk booking provides a sensible starting point for gathering data and finding the answers.
