6 Ways Your Workspace Booking Systems Can Support a Return to Office Strategy

My interest was piqued by Amazon’s recent open corporate memo mandating a very controversial ‘return to the office’ for all.

In addition to being an unpopular move with employees, many organisations considering a similar route may also be faced with practical roadblocks – especially if they’ve downsized their office portfolio.

This aside, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy emphasised the need to be “better set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected to each other” in order to strengthen its culture and teams.

We suspect most business leaders will resonate with this sentiment.

Whether you need to accommodate more people into a likely smaller office space, make the whole concept of visiting the office ‘less onerous’, or optimise opportunities for in-person collaboration, a workspace booking system can help.

How a Workspace Booking System Can Improve Office Visits

By allowing employees to pre-book their workspaces and even their parking spots in advance, companies can not only avoid overcrowding, they can also remove the barriers from coming into the office and make a trip to the office more fruitful and appealing.

1. Prevent Overcrowding: Managing footfall is essential for health and safety. A booking system ensures you can ‘throttle’ the number of people in the office at any given time. Employees are guaranteed a place to sit and won’t waste time hunting for a desk. The same applies to parking, helping avoid frustration and lost time – not to mention a bit of car park rage.
2. Boost Employee Confidence: Knowing they have a reserved desk and (if applicable) a parking spot can alleviate a significant amount of stress for employees. It gives them peace of mind, allowing them to focus on their work rather than worrying about the daily logistics of their commute. Floor plans (maps) also help locate the booked workspace in a new or re-worked office.
3. Offer a Productive Environment: Do you need to escape screaming kids and needy dogs at home? A visit to the office and the ability to book a ‘quiet pod’ may be just what you need. Conversely after too much time alone, you may crave some human interaction. A workspace booking system allows workspaces to be selected according to the facilities on offer (e.g. an ergonomic desk, Teams VC, soundproofing, in an open area, and so on).
4. Get More IRL Interactions: Ever commuted to the office only to find no one else is there? You could have saved yourself the hassle and worked from home. With the ability to pre-book a desk near your colleagues, see who plans to be in the office, or allow team leaders to reserve spaces for their teams, you can maximise opportunities for spontaneous, productive, and fun in-person interactions. After all, who doesn’t enjoy a bit of office banter?
5. Share Space Equitably: A workspace booking system can let you share the facilities you have more fairly, for example, by setting policies that earmark space for certain teams, or allow sought after resources to be made available on a limited basis.
6. Understand Who’s Coming In: Workspace booking systems provide insights into office occupancy, allowing you to see trends like who is visiting the office and which workspaces are most popular. With this information, you can enhance popular facilities and better support those who are not coming into the office. Note that it’s important to be sensitive about how this data is used and communicated, ensuring transparency and respect for employee privacy.

Prepare for the Future of Work 

Is your office ready for the full return? Now’s the time to put systems in place that will help make the transition as smooth as possible for your team. 

If, as we suspect, your organisation isn’t issuing a full-time office working policy, a booking system offers so many tangible benefits to employees, facilities teams and business leaders alike….