The Guide to Smart Desk Booking Software

How Smart Desk Booking Software can help saving money

Having a smart desk booking tool is a great addition to your workplace. It can help you save money on (reducing) your office space. It can also help you save time when you need to find a desk for your team. If you see that a large part of your workplace is never booked and used, you could close off certain floors or even some buildings (on certain days) reducing real estate costs and/or energy costs. In the work environment, desk bookings eliminate the need for employees to constantly ask for desk space from their co-workers. Furthermore, this hot desk booking software can become an ally to boost smart office solutions. Because it gives employees the ability to plan ahead and know that they will have a place to work when they arrive at the office. 

Desk booking is key in the workspace of today, with many businesses sharing their office space with other companies. It’s important to have a central system that helps people to find desks when they are available. The software can also allow the user to see the booking behaviour of other colleagues. In this way, people can also see which colleagues will be at the office and where they will be sitting. Furthermore, seeing the booked seats also gives employees an indication of the business of each department making them book a desired (quiet) desk that will likely improve their productivity. 

Overall, it makes the office more efficient in multiple ways, reducing stress and energy of employees, by better synchronising and scheduling workplace use making them more productive. But it also supports facility managers in effective space use. Together, this will, directly and indirectly, save money. 

Different Uses for Smart Desk Booking Software

A desk booking software can be used for various purposes like reducing waiting time, decreasing territorialisation of teams and increasing productivity. For hot desking, booking software is particularly useful since it keeps track of the availability of workspaces such as desks, sitting places and meeting rooms in (almost) real-time. But there are more ways desk booking software improves the workplace:

• Allocating workstations, meeting rooms and special desk areas 
• Providing a central inventory for all the furniture in the office
• Monitoring the use of workstations, meeting rooms and special desk areas
• Understanding the grouping of employees and teams at the workplace 
• Control access to workstations and meeting rooms 
• Aiding with planning office moves or expansions
• Automating the process of booking specific rooms or spaces with certain characteristics bound to the activity that is intended for
• Understanding the popularity of specific rooms and spaces
• Helping with managing facility management and moving costs
• Reduce cleaning costs by monitoring workspace use

Best Practices for Implementing an optimal Smart Desk Booking Software

The success of your tool is depended on your employees. They are the ones who consciously reserve a desk. If a large number of employees don’t do this, the success of the tool is at stake. Employees should realise the importance of the desk booking tool and might need to know or experience its usefulness. If it’s not useful to them personally, one might educate them on how it’s useful for the organisation as a whole or/and for other employees. Finally, by making it easier for employees to reserve a desk (for example by using QR-code stickers on the desk), reserving a desk becomes less of a hustle for them.

Conclusion

Across this guide, we discussed multiple ways how smart desk booking software can optimise workplace use and can help to save time and money. As there are several ways of using desk booking software, several services have also specialised in certain directions. Picking the desk booking tool that fits your needs and your employees is the next step. We offer iBASX and are more specialised into booking and workplace use analytics. But there are also multiple other tools available. Good luck!