As Office Managers, you’re likely navigating the complexities of transitioning your workplace to a hybrid model.
It’s a shift that demands reimagining your space to accommodate both in-person and remote work, extending far beyond traditional office management duties.
Suddenly, you’re tasked with becoming a hybrid work expert, ensuring your workspace meets the evolving needs of your team. On top of your other duties, finding time to do this can be challenging.
Fortunately, this guide is here to support you, offering a playbook tailored to Office Managers’ unique challenges in crafting a thriving hybrid environment.
Let’s get started!
The Role of Office Managers in Hybrid Work
Since the dawn of hybrid work, the role of the physical office has had to adapt — fast.
With the sharp rise in remote work and work from third spaces, your company’s physical workspace is no longer the only viable place to get work done.
Your role as an Office Manager has had to adapt just as quickly, and your responsibility is now to ensure that both remote and in-person work can continue to flourish at your organization.
This involves finding the right technology to support you on your journey to facilitate seamless collaboration among team members, regardless of where they choose to work.
Among other things, you might be expected to:
- Tailor the office environment to meet the needs of in-office and remote workers.
- Specify the requirements your company has for hybrid work solutions, including desk and room booking capabilities.
- Guarantee the new systems integrate flawlessly with your company’s existing tech infrastructure.
- Champion the adoption of these new tools across the workforce, ensuring all of your employees are comfortable and proficient in their use.
The next challenge lies in identifying which tool will best serve your unique organizational culture and operational requirements.
How to Identify Your Office’s Desk Booking Needs
Your role as Office Managers has probably made you more than familiar with the everyday hustle of adapting to your workspace’s unique needs.
You might be in charge of just one single office space, but the unpredictable ebb and flow of your employees makes it hard to understand how your space is actually being used. Or maybe you oversee a network of global offices, in which case your needs are completely different – but no less complex!
Before looking into the solutions for desk booking on the market, you could consider following these first steps:
- Assess the current use of your space
Understand how your team operates on a day-to-day basis, both in the office and remotely. Is there a pattern to how and where people get their work done? Getting to the bottom of the actual day-to-day use of your space will help you hone in on a system that supports your existing processes. - Gather wide-ranging Input
Collect perspectives from across departments to capture the full spectrum of needs and preferences within your company. Which hybrid personas can you identify, and what are their distinguishing features? It’s important your desk booking solution eventually caters to a variety of different work styles. - Identify key objectives
Determine what you aim to achieve with a hybrid work platform—whether it’s boosting productivity, fostering in-person collaboration, or optimizing real estate usage. Understanding your ultimate goals will guide your selection process and keep you hyper focused on the outcome for your company.
This three-step approach will give you a comprehensive understanding of your company’s requirements, and lead to a more informed decision on the appropriate desk booking system.
Choose the Right Hot Desk Booking Software
It’s crunch time. You’ve understood the importance of your role as Office Manager in the transition to hybrid work, and conducted some research into your main needs as an organization.
So how do you now go about choosing the desk booking software that will fit the bill?
Here’s our tried-and-tested method for getting you to the right provider:
- Evaluate the technical side
Consider working together with your IT department to understand the specifications of solutions, their integration capabilities, and security features required to support your infrastructure efficiently. Perhaps the most important question of all is how the solution will integrate within your current workflow (Slack / Microsoft Teams / Google Workspace) and get your team booking spaces seamlessly from their current digital set up. - Prioritize outstanding UI and UX
There’s nothing worse than being sold on a vision, then discovering the product itself is totally unusable. Make sure the UI and UX of the desk booking solution you go for is sleek, robust and easy to start using without any context. The importance of good design on both desktop and mobile can’t be understated for ensuring quick (and enjoyable!) adoption by your team. - Look out for the right features
There are plenty of desk booking options on the market, but not all of them have the features that will help your employees get together more frequently — while you gain a clearer picture of your office space usage. Look out for solutions that are AI powered and can send smart suggestions about when and why to book a desk, and those that give you full data and analytics on how your physical workspaces are being used. - Facilitate collaboration
At the end of the day, you want to make sure that your desk hoteling software brings your people together to do their best work. The success of your business depends on it! That’s why you should consider aiming for hybrid management software that enables teams to book spaces on a regular basis, and lets you customise and arrange your office view for different neighborhoods and high-focus zones. - Look to the future
Time passes, teams grow, things change. When they do — you want to ensure that your hybrid operating platform can change with you. Does your future platform have access to a network of on-demand workspaces, in case your own offices can no longer hold your growing workforce? Your desk booking software should empower you and your teammates to stay as flexible as possible — even through major changes to your people and spaces.
Kadence as Your Hybrid Partner Into the Future
As you step into the evolving role of an Office Manager in a hybrid workspace, you are not just managing spaces but actively shaping the future of work for your organization.
With Kadence, you gain a partner equipped to navigate these changes, offering comprehensive solutions for desk and room booking, space management, and providing valuable insights to optimize your office layout and usage.
Our platform leverages AI to ensure your colleagues are coming together more frequently and with greater intention that ever, and helps your teams set regular in-person meetings so they can collaborate more effectively.
Kadence’s emphasis on seamless integration and exceptional user experience means your transition to a hybrid model will be smooth and effective, and fit into any kind of existing workflow. Our platform also gives you exclusive access to LiquidSpace, a global network of on-demand workspaces, ensuring that we can keep you flexible and effective long into the future.
If you want to learn more about how Kadence can help take your use of physical office space to the next level, you can find out more here.
If you’d like to see Kadence in action, don’t hesitate to get in touch and book a demo with us.
