If you’re a manager or employee at a transportation company, you’ll be more than familiar with the challenges of hybrid work. With employees moving between home office and in-person work at will, it can be difficult to understand how your spaces are being used — and where your opportunities for optimization lie.
And yet making the best use of your space is easier said than done. The reality of hybrid work is that people tend to come and go at will — even if you have rules already in place. With this unpredictability, how can you ever fully understand how your office is being used?
In this article, we’ll look at some of the most common challenges transportation companies face in managing their spaces and explore how space management software can help you optimize your use of physical space.
1. Introduce Desk Sharing
One of the most common challenges faced by transportation companies is the inefficient use of desk space.
The quick rise of hybrid work has meant that, in many cases, employees continue hanging on to their own permanent desks – despite visiting the office infrequently. The result is empty office floors and a plain waste of useful space.
Do you really need your own desk if you only plan to come into the office once a week?
The Solution
Space management tools are designed to organize people and spaces efficiently with smart desk sharing. With a simple booking flow, desk sharing can transform your use of your physical office space by reducing the overall number of desks and streamlining the experience of office-based work. Some space management tools even offer office neighborhood planning, which means you can design certain areas of the office around tasks, roles or departments. Desk sharing will help you save space which can be used for more critical functions, like meeting or training rooms — while also bringing your space back to life and boosting your company culture.
2. Utilize Your Office Efficiently
As a transportation company, you might be grappling with the idea that don’t use your space efficiently enough. Although you may have some basic functionality for desk booking or room scheduling, you still fail to understand which areas of your office are being used, and which are not.
Perhaps some floors are bursting with life, while others are quiet and underused. The uneven distribution of your people in your spaces leads to inefficient management of resources (energy that’s used to power parts of the office that are always empty) and frustration among employees, who may find it difficult to access the spaces they need when they need them.
So how do you stay on top of the day-to-day use of your space?
The Solution
Introducing a space management tool into your workflow will immediately help you utilize your office more efficiently. Look out for tools that come equipped with data and analytics, providing valuable insights into space utilization trends and patterns. By seeing how your spaces are used throughout the day, week, or month, you can identify problems and opportunities and make decisions that benefit everyone involved. Perhaps you’ve noticed that you could stop powering a certain zone in your office to save on your energy bills — or seen an opportunity for building a new meeting room in a quiet corner of the building.
3. Cut Down Real Estate Costs
In today’s tough economic climate, your transportation company is most likely looking for ways to cut down unnecessary costs attached to the business. One of those costs — perhaps your biggest fixed cost — is your real estate lease.
But downsizing office space is a big decision — and it takes a great deal of confidence to arrive at. With employees spread between home and the office, you might not know how your spaces are being used — and therefore what action you can take to downsize and reduce your real estate bill.
Ultimately, you might not have the answer to a simple question: what size office do we need?
The Solution
Transportation companies could benefit greatly from implementing desk booking management tools. Desk booking tools give you a proper understanding of the use of your office space and help you come to decisions about how you manage your space. By implementing a desk hoteling system, you no longer need permanent desk space and instead gain a clearer picture into how many desks your office floor actually needs. Working with space management software ultimately empowers transportation companies to optimize their space usage and make important decisions on where and how to downsize.
4. Introduce Office Neighborhoods For Face-to-Face Collaboration
At your transportation company, you might be facing the challenge that your office zones are poorly organized and compromise on proper collaboration and quality face-to-face time.
In a hybrid work system, employees can sometimes end up dispersed around the office floor in ways that don’t make sense for team cohesion and connection.
Although you are set on implementing a desk booking tool that helps you organize your people better, you want to make sure this comes hand in hand with the right people working alongside each other.
The Solution
Make sure to implement a space management tool that offers office neighborhoods and permissions. These tools allow admins to assign specific neighborhoods (groups of desks) to specific teams and set permissions to control who can book or access these spaces. Say goodbye to isolated employees working floors away from their teams! With office neighbourhoods, you’ll ensure the right people and working alongside each other whenever they are in the office – making for the best collaboration possible, and the quality social time that makes up your company culture.
5. Uphold Security and Privacy Standards
You’ve heard it before: privacy, privacy, privacy. As a transportation company, protecting the security and privacy of your employees is another big challenge, and not one you take lightly.
Not only are you responsible for protecting sensitive information related to your employees, you’re also always having to make sure you uphold the highest industry standards for data protection — and not fall behind.
The Solution
Go for space management software that takes security and privacy seriously. Your tool should be SOC 2 compliant, maintain Cyber Essentials certification, and data should be encrypted both in-transit and at rest. Partnering with a space management tool that maintains the highest data and privacy standards will give you peace of mind when integrating a new tool into your transportation company workflow.
Kadence: The Smart Space Management Tool for Transportation Companies
The best space management tools go above and beyond room and desk booking capabilities.
Tools like Kadence have a track record in helping transportation companies solve the challenges presented by hybrid work, offering a holistic space management solution tailored to all kinds of use cases.
Our platform leverages AI-driven desk booking and flexible scheduling, data analytics, powerful integrations, and robust security measures to organize your people and spaces and get the most out of hybrid work.
Trust Kadence to provide the tools you need to create a seamless, efficient, and secure environment for your employees.
