Nailing The Functional
Basics of The Workplace

The world of knowledge work has changed significantly over the past 100 years, but the change over the past 5 years has been far more dramatic. We are now firmly in an era of hybrid and flexible working. However, before companies can start to focus on higher-level issues, they need to nail the basics of what makes workplaces function.

The basic pieces of making a hybrid workplace function are desk booking (personal space), room booking (shared space), and schedule coordination. In this blog, we’ll get into why the basics are so important and then we’ll be expanding on each of these over the next four weeks.

It can be tempting to try and return to what we knew and assume that all of our employees can self-sort, find space, coordinate rooms, and organize schedules. That can't work for small groups that aren’t distributed or working in a hybrid environment. However, employees are more distributed than ever not just at a team level but at an organizational level. Because of this, it’s important to nail these basic parts and pieces to enable a frictionless workplace.

If you’re anything like over 50% of our customers, you have more people than you do desks. In today’s economy most are choosing not to expand their spaces, but rather optimize their use. Hybrid presents an opportunity to maximize space and productivity. We’ll dive into the opportunities and challenges.

When it comes to desk setups and personal space, every employee knows far more about their needs and desires than ever before. It’s because of this that ensuring they can book or get access to the resources they need is vital. To make this effective you need a good strategy and setup. Once you invest that initial time, this should be one of the easier pieces to manage.

Shared resources like conference rooms, collaboration areas, and even all-hands spaces are more in demand than ever. As more companies bring teams on site for their “off sites” those areas are in continual use. However, increased demand also means you have to manage these resources more closely and efficiently.

There is little more needlessly frustrating situation than to have one person in a 12-person meeting room when a team is trying to host an on-site. According to a 2023 CBRE report, companies that implemented advanced room booking systems saw a reduction in space wastage by up to 35%. wondering how much-wasted space you might have? Check out our free office space calculator.

Scheduling is likely the trickiest of the basics because there are many many humans involved and outside factors like traffic etc come into play. There are a million reasons why schedules can change daily, however, that’s why this is one of the basics for us.

A comprehensive study by Asana (2022) revealed that inadequate schedule management leads to approximately 30% inefficiency in team operations. In our deep dive, we’ll look at different tactics for better coordination and also share some of what we’re building to help ease this for teams.

So you’ve mastered all these basics and you feel like you’ve got them mostly running smoothly. That’s great! That means you’re ready to move onto the next level of getting your workplace humming.

In our second series of this year, we’ll start talking a lot more about automation and how to use AI to manage your workplace.