Guide to New Workplace Lingo

Your Modern Workplace Lingo Guide: Hoteling. Hot Desking. Flexible Working

Workplace, office, meeting rooms, and so on. These were once the more dominant words associated with the day to day work grind. It used to dominate what we at Roomzilla would not only cover with our platform but also with our articles from naming your conference rooms to the importance of workplace design. While reminiscing on those more straightforward times does sometimes occur, let’s face the facts, those were also times when our industry was less a “must have” and more a “nice to have if we have the budget”. All that has changed, but not necessarily due to the pandemic itself. Looking at the following charts, we can see trends displaying that some trends we only focus on now, have actually been in the making for a while:

Source: https://www.us.jll.com/en/coworking-market-growth

It’s only due to the current global pandemic that we now see equal weight between remote working and actually showing up to the workplace. More importantly, a wider acceptance of the new trends by companies that would not have considered it previously.

With that in mind, now is a good time to get you up to speed with the new lingo of the current workplace culture. Let’s start with flexible working. This is the all encompassing definition of the current working trend and covers everything from start / finish times being redefined and less strict (i.e. no more just 9-5) to the option of being able to work from home. While it may sound like a plan for company work efficiency disaster, due to its nature it actually is starting to promote a healthier employee work/life balance, and as a result a higher level of loyalty and motivation.

Source: https://theaseanpost.com/article/rise-flexible-work-arrangements

That leads us to the next item, which is a main sub-category of flexible working, namely desk hoteling. This critical topic is all about the ability for the new flexible working generation to be able to book workspaces anytime they need to from anywhere (not necessarily from within the workplace itself) and promotes a more efficient telecommuting / workplace hybrid work setup but at the same time ensures that a company’s real estate is not only used more efficiently but more of it is actually used in general. Roomzilla has had to continue to develop its platform to support this rising trend with features that not only enable such booking management but also ensures that workspaces are in use continuously.

The last topic is hot desking which is often confused with desk hoteling but it is more like an ad hoc version of it. By that we mean that hot desking often entails on the spot picking of one’s place of work. While this may sound like an easier to manage solution, the reality is it can be even more difficult considering how important resource and time management now become. Again the Roomzilla platform has been developed with this in mind especially with our interactive workplace map feature.

Now that you’re up to speed on the difference between the currently very popular terminology in not just workplace but its management, we hope that you’ll be able to use it and find new ideas on how best find the balance between fully utilizing your workplace and keeping your staff and users safe.