The old problems were adjacency issues and midnight acquisitions of the seats near the window. In our brave new world of occupancy, we’re now challenged with how to scale the space we own to fit one-third to two-thirds of the occupants we had a year ago. Since a fair number of companies are now going hybrid on some level, those not in the office full-time will need a place to post up for varied lengths of time. Think of every office as being like a conference room — it can be used by anyone at any time. Our job: keep track of it and report on how much space the company actually needs.
This goes well beyond Covid-19. It has to do with what we all learned from a year of working from home. This new trend is not a pump-fake — it’s here to stay, as the current survey data suggests. People want to work from home at least part of the time.
IFMA defines hoteling as: “The practice of allocating available workspaces on demand to employees or others when required.” There’s a lot baked into that definition. There are really three things going on:
- Reserved Spaces — We need to identify some spaces as reserved so that we don’t allocate them to something else. These encumbered spaces will either have people or functions assigned.
- Hybrid Personnel with Set Scheduled Days — It looks like we’re going to have a fair number of personnel on a set schedule (M-W-F, T-Th, etc.). For these personnel we can also choose to double up locations or use their offices in some way when they’re not in. Set schedulers might also want to use a simple check-in/check-out app-based procedure.
- Hoteling/Reservations — These are the most random of the bunch. There is the potential here to break up a space into hours, much like how you use a conference room. At Collectiveview, we’ve already built the tools — though for the past few years we had been using them for a different purpose: helping clients who were already trying to figure out how to stack employees into shrinking spaces.
Our approach is based on who is doing the requesting. For problem #1, our space planning users can allocate the spaces and update the departments that are using the space. For #2, our traditional MAC (Move, Add, Change) process assigns a workspace, and the end user or space planning staff can use the reservation system or our App to set up check-ins. Those check-ins can also alert cleaning staff or trigger any type of work order necessary to facilitate the occupancy. For #3, we use our reservation system, which acts as a catch-all for the remaining allocations — any temporary space, remote staff, temp employee, hoteling, part-time encumbrances, and more.