Roomzilla | Smart workplace management system

Hot Desks – Social Distancing Socializing

Hot desks and the idea of hot desking has been around for a while now. Not everybody knows that the concept itself came to life in the 80’s when some companies working in ‘shift modes’ realized their desks are rarely used all at once and unnecessary cost arose. The idea started to gain rapid interest, flourishing with the world-wide expansion of both the coworking spaces and shared offices concepts.

Recently, hot desking and the idea of flexible work arrangements have gained even more interest across the globe. The virus outbreak in 2020 forced employees all over the world to change the way they work and basically forced everyone to stay in their homes and work remotely. With preventative measures in place, companies have already started defrosting their operations and slowly inviting employees back to the office. However, the post-pandemic way of working is going to differ from what we were all used to, and employers are paying more attention to social distancing rules as well as their employees’ safety.

Here at Roomzilla we have been observing a new and emerging trend already. When talking to our existing clients as well as new ones inquiring about our product, we’ve noticed more and more companies are interested in introducing flexible work arrangements with resource management systems in place as well. This trend is in line with our initial analysis and predictions made while the pandemic was still in full swing around the world (our article about this can be found here). What’s even more interesting is that the majority of our partners mention ‘hot desking’ among main solutions they are going to move to in the coming future.

How hot desking may help you better arrange your office and your employees safety?

First of all, introducing shared and changeable seat assignments aka ‘hot desks’ is a process and is rarely successfully implemented overnight. You may want to give yourself – and the team – the time to get used to the new arrangement. The initial few f days may be tricky and full of surprises, but after a week or so everything should start normalizing and you’ll already be able to see the benefits of the new system.

Benefits of hot desks in the new ‘social distancing’ work mode:

  1. Limit the number of people simultaneously present in the office
    With hot desks and a reservation system implemented you take control over the number of people showing up in the office every single day. You exactly know who is going to sit in front of which desk and when. You can plan ahead your office occupancy and always pinpoint particular employees to their desks.
  2. Ensure a proper distance between desks
    The 1.5 – 2 meters (~5-6 ft) distance between desks rule is now being implemented and followed by companies across the world. With a map drawing feature you can create a responsive office plan on your floor plan blueprint and scale it accordingly. You can arrange your office space for your employees, making sure their work stations are always at a safe distance from each other.
  3. Make sure employees are NOT crowding up in any place
    By mapping your available desks on floor plan you make sure people don’t squeeze themselves in one part of the office. Be sure to equally spread available to book desks and other office resources around your workspace.
  4. Keeping your desks and workstation cleaner and sanitized
    This is both a benefit but also a necessary requirement to make hot desking work: Implementing a flexible desk assignment system should come with mandatory criteria requiring your employees to clean their work space after they’re done with their daily tasks. On top of that, with a resource management system in place, you can notify your cleaning service providers which desks were occupied and ask for its disinfection.
    Optimize space usage – lower your office cost
  5. With a hot desking system implemented you don’t have to keep your big office real estate anymore. By smartly managing your office occupancy you can decrease its cost by up to 30% according to recent studies.
  6. Social Distancing Socializing
    By changing their desks every couple of days, your employees may meet new people from various departments. You can encourage better intermingling among staff now that people are free to move around and choose where they want to sit on a particular day.

With new social distancing and safety rules being implemented by companies around the world a new need emerges alongside. Arming your office with a robust resource reservation system and introducing a hot desking work scheme will help with providing safety and comfort to your team in the post-pandemic ‘new normal’.

See how easy it is to set up your interactive floor plan and hot desks on our video.