Saving energy in the office using a workspace booking system

If you glanced around the average office, you may wonder whether there was a need to pre-book desks at all.  According to recent studies, two thirds of desks remain unused.

The general trend for working from home combined with rail strikes and rocketing fuel costs means that there’s JUST SO MUCH empty office space, you might wonder if there’s a need for booking workspaces in advance.

With energy prices going through the roof, saving energy in the office is vital and a workspace booking system can help you achieve this.

Use office space more efficiently to save on energy bills

A workspace booking system can help facilities managers understand how their office is currently being used, identify popular areas, and effectively close off under-utilised floors or areas that are expensive to heat helping enterprises reduce energy bills.

It will then allow workers to share a much smaller office footprint without contention, on the basis that individuals must pre-book a workspace and not just ‘turn up’.

We’ve had a number of requests from existing customers that want to block out entire floors from their desk and room booking systems in a bid to reduce costs.

For example, a local government customer with a 60’s concrete office has taken the decision to close off an entire wing that is draughty and expensive to heat.

This approach shrinks the overall available office footprint and means that more people need to share a small area.

Our interactive floor plans can be updated to show exactly what workspaces are available and on what days.  Individuals simply book their preferred workspace in advance.

Avoid waste when booking workspaces and other resources

Meeting room no-shows, over ordering catering….these are a few wasteful habits that a workspace booking system can help you avoid.

If no one has checked into a meeting room within a specified timeframe, a workspace booking system can automatically cancel the booking, freeing it up for others to use.

Your workspace booking system can also send reminders to meeting organisers, prompting them to cancel the booking if it’s no longer required, or adjust catering orders if the number of ‘in person’ attendees changes.

On this last point, given that many meetings are now hybrid meetings, the right booking system can automatically make suggestions about the size of meeting room that will match the invite number of delegates that plan to ,attend ‘in person’.  This could make the difference between heating a 4-person pod versus a 20-seater meeting room.

There’s many other ways to avoid the very wasteful ‘no show’ habit

Ingraining these types of behaviours will benefit your enterprise and add to your overall sustainability.

Use your workspace booking system reports to make informed decisions

A workspace booking system will help you report on trends and make decisions to re-open sections of the office as needed.

You may even use this information to justify closing an office location altogether.

With the help of desk booking systems and occupancy utilisation analytics, you can make sure that you are using your office and resources effectively, for the winter months and beyond.

Get in touch and we can chat about what our clients are doing, and what’s working well for them in practical terms.