You can rent smaller offices with fewer fixed desks and some open ones free for anyone to use for whenever people needs to pop in. Hybrid offers benefits too.
Then you run into the issue that you need a reservation model and you end up unable to provide enough desks to guarantee that teams are able to meet at the office when necessary if they don’t make their reservation early enough.
Hell, where I work we have quotas and people can’t meet them because they can’t manage to get a seat at the office they used to work in full time before 2020 and they certainly won’t waste an hour in traffic to go to the next office closest to them.
Sounds like poor provisioning? In my office we a booking system for the meeting rooms, but we never had an issue with taking hot desks. Maybe a few times your favorite choice might be taken, and that’s all.
Even without a meeting room, if my team had an emergency and needed everyone to meet at the office sometime in the next week, the only place everyone would be able to have a seat in the same room is in the food court because we’re not the only department that has people needing to RTO.
If you want to have enough space for emergencies is to have enough space for everyone to be 100% in the office.
Tangentially, the disaster recovery plan for a company I worked for 20 years ago included provisions of shift work for 9-5 people. If one of the major offices were to become unavailable due to fire or whatever, the other location would accommodate the extra workforce by going 6-2, 2-10, essentially doubling the desk count until a permanent solution was found. Back then, everybody was 100% office based.
You can rent smaller offices with fewer fixed desks and some open ones free for anyone to use for whenever people needs to pop in. Hybrid offers benefits too.
Then you run into the issue that you need a reservation model and you end up unable to provide enough desks to guarantee that teams are able to meet at the office when necessary if they don’t make their reservation early enough.
Hell, where I work we have quotas and people can’t meet them because they can’t manage to get a seat at the office they used to work in full time before 2020 and they certainly won’t waste an hour in traffic to go to the next office closest to them.
Sounds like poor provisioning? In my office we a booking system for the meeting rooms, but we never had an issue with taking hot desks. Maybe a few times your favorite choice might be taken, and that’s all.
Offices always have had limited meeting rooms and same reservation concept applies. Not a new challenge.
Right. We have an office calendar that books rooms automatically if you post on it. Had that since we’ll before we were wfh.
Even without a meeting room, if my team had an emergency and needed everyone to meet at the office sometime in the next week, the only place everyone would be able to have a seat in the same room is in the food court because we’re not the only department that has people needing to RTO.
If you want to have enough space for emergencies is to have enough space for everyone to be 100% in the office.
Tangentially, the disaster recovery plan for a company I worked for 20 years ago included provisions of shift work for 9-5 people. If one of the major offices were to become unavailable due to fire or whatever, the other location would accommodate the extra workforce by going 6-2, 2-10, essentially doubling the desk count until a permanent solution was found. Back then, everybody was 100% office based.