5 hot desking tips and tricks for easier hybrid working
Hot desking solutions are more popular than ever as more companies shift to hybrid work. In a hybrid workplace, employees have more choice about when they come into the office, with research showing workers spend around 1.5 days a week there. This means fewer people are in the office day-to-day and can leave around 40 per cent of desk space unused, giving space planners the challenge of reconfiguring spaces to better accommodate our changing world of work.
Let’s take a look at how the right approach to hot desking can make hybrid working better for your employees.
What is hot desking?
Hot desking simply means that desks don’t belong to any one person. Employees in the office choose a desk (or another type of workstation) to use for the day.
Using desk booking software is one of the best ways to implement hot desking. Having employees book a desk before they get to the office makes you less likely to run into conflict and chaos. This method is often called “desk hotelling” — more on that in a minute.
Want to learn all about hot desking? You’ve come to the right place! Take a look through our previous posts about hot desking best practices, hot desking advantages and disadvantages, and more!
5 Hot desking tips for better hybrid work
In a hybrid company, it’s important to find a balance between designing a space around flexibility and ensuring employees feel welcome and equipped with everything they need.
With the right approach to hot desking, many potential problems are easily resolved. Here are the top 5 things to keep in mind when hot desking in your hybrid office.
Use a desk booking system and embrace desk hoteling
Over the last few years, we’ve all learned that the more organized we are at work, the better we can adapt and stay productive. The same can be said for hot desking in the hybrid era. Pure hot desking can lead to a game of musical chairs nobody wants to play. If everyone chooses their workspace when they get into the office, you might end up with people not having access to the spaces or equipment they need to get their best work done.
Desk hoteling can solve seating challenges by using hot desking software solutions to keep things organized. A great hot desking app will let employees see open spaces in the office, book in advance, release spaces if plans change, and make it easy to find where colleagues are working in the office.
Desk booking software can also send notifications, integrate with your company’s existing calendar and email tools, help you welcome visitors, and give you valuable data about which workspaces are most frequently booked.
Desk hoteling is also a great way to set up recurring space bookings. These allow teams to automatically reserve a meeting room or collaboration space for the same time each week — no more searching for a table large enough for everyone.
Use smarter office design
Ensuring your office design encourages both focused and collaborative working is key to creating an agile, hybrid working space that serves different purposes.
This involves having both bookable private spaces and desks for lone-working and various sizes of meeting rooms and break-out areas that facilitate group working. Types of space businesses may think of having in the workplace include cafes and open kitchens, huddle areas, and quiet spaces for deep work.
Working with a space planner can help you analyze how your employees use your workspaces and what changes you can make to the layout to better accommodate everyone’s needs.
Don’t forget about personal space
While employees may not have a desk to make their own anymore, they’ll still need somewhere to stash their belongings. Having a space in the office for people to put their things, like individual lockers, means that employees still have an area to call their own and can help hesitant workers adapt to the loss of assigned desks.
It’s also important to design your office space to be as welcoming and enticing as possible. People won’t show up in the office if they don’t enjoy working there — especially if they’ve already got a comfortable office space set up at home.
Try open-plan, flexible designs that encourage conversation and collaboration. These spaces promote a sense of community and are also easy to shift and change into different configurations.
Use flexible desk booking to encourage team working
We know by now that working from home can be isolating at times. Working as a team isn’t always easy when everyone is in separate locations. Hot desks and desk hoteling allow people to work with their friends and teammates by booking desks in the same area of the office.
These flexible seating arrangements can bring together teams working on projects, help new employees get to know their colleagues, encourage a culture of collaboration, and facilitate regular catch-ups and informal team meetings.
Listen to what your teams want
This is a relatively new way of working that can be intimidating to some employees, especially those who have been more hesitant to adopt hybrid working or return to the office.
Listening to feedback from employees, both good and bad, is integral to making the workplace the best it can be for everyone. It also helps you identify where something isn’t working and can be changed.
The new hybrid workplace should be adaptable and flexible. Space needs to fulfil several different requirements and cater to various needs. The best way to make sure you’re meeting that challenge is to get regular feedback from your employees and make efforts to address their concerns and requests.
Make the most of hot desking with Smartway by HubStar
The backbone of all good hot desking solutions is a powerful desk booking system like Smartway2. Our fully-featured workplace scheduling solution can help employees book desks and meeting rooms from anywhere, give decision-makers usage data and valuable analytics, and help you create the most functional hybrid office possible.
Get in touch for a demo to see how Smartway2 can help you get hot desking right!
