Re-opening the office is a lot easier with the use of Office Spaces. One can easily manage the maximum number of occupied desks to adhere to ESD (Employee Social Distancing) rules. However, there are some things to take into consideration when configuring your Office Spaces package. As often clients think they only need to configure the desk they want to have available for booking at that time. This article explains three reasons why covering all desks with Office Spaces is important.
- Aim for consistency between the end user app and the real office.
To ensure proper desk discovery and usability for end users, we should aim to create the least disparity between what you see in the app and the real office. For example, if the only two ESD desks available are configured in a cluster of four desks, the user of the app will see two desks, even though there are four desks in the office. This can confuse users and might discourage them from using the app. We'll explain this issue further with the use of the illustration below.
If the scenario above was reflected on this illustration one would only see the green dots in the map. Someone might therefore make the wrong assumption that the full office is open and free when in reality 50% of the desks are free and the other 50% are blocked. Hence why configuring all desks with Office Dots or stickers ensures an accurate representation of the office for end users.
- Allow for flexibility
It's best to have an Office Dot or an NFC sticker on all desks, not just the socially distanced ones, so that you can control what percentage of desks are available at any given time. For example, a 20% occupation ratio might be the acceptable norm now, but in the future that might increase to 40% or reduce to 10%. Changing this occupation ration is difficult if all "blocked" desks are not in the current system. - Upfront configuration
For ease of configuration of Office Spaces and managing the way that social distancing is ensured in a future-proof manner it's a good idea to make sure the whole office is covered. The performance of Office Spaces isn't adversely affected by this set-up, but it does make it easier to manage change in uncertain times. Only configuring Office Dots on the desks used for ESD results in multiple days of deployment and configuration when one decides to upscale their Office Spaces solution. We've learned from experience, the planning of a deployment is more time consuming than the execution. This is especially the case for our sticker solution. Deploying all desks at once opens all future flexibility for reorganisation, up and downscaling, and office occupation rapports.