Part 2 of 3
If you haven’t read last week’s post, here’s a quick summary:
To intensify the use of office space whilst enabling flexible working for employees, works styles have to be considered:
- “Hub” employees need a fixed desk
- “Club” employees have flexible roles that involve in-person and virtual meetings
- “Home” workers are based from home offices on some days per week
- “Roam” employees are almost always on the road
To understand how desks are used, and hence which style an employee fits in, occupancy sensors under desks help gather valuable data.
Desking policy
So, based on a detailed understanding how a space is used, organisations can now adapt their desking policy to make better use of their space.
- “Hub” employees will still require fixed desks, or a desk that they can release for others to book if not in the office, Condeco call that a flexi desk.
- “Club” employees are ideal users for flexible desking, either pre-bookable, or as simple touchdown spaces, dependent on their daily schedule.
- “Home” workers can either use flexi desks, where they can release the desk when not in the office, hot desks for when they are in the office, or touchdown spaces when they come to the office for meetings. This really depends if they need a permanent desk when they are in the office.
- “Roam” employees can use touchdown spaces, or pre-bookable hot desks.
Flexible working environments
A mix of fixed desks, shared desks, bookable desks and touchdown spaces creates the ideal flexible working environment. Using desk booking software together with desk screens, you can introduce all these different styles:
- Desks that can be released if someone isn’t in the office, either manually or automatically if the employee doesn’t turn up at a specific time
- Pre-bookable desks, or
- Walk up desks where people can just turn up and sit down, either with or without booking.
Desk booking systems also make it easy to keep track where people are; a simple “Find a colleague” feature is available in Condeco’s Desk Booking Kiosk, the mobile app, and the web application, so even when people are using different spaces every day, they can be easily found.
There is more to this though. Nowadays, in offices people rarely do the same thing all day. They often require different spaces for different activities.
In the final post of this 3-part series, I will explore how the workspace is changing, and how different types of workspaces help staff being more productive.