Manage Your Office With Ease Thanks to Workspace Reservations

Many of our customers have been in touch throughout 2020, eager to find out if we can help them keep their office as safe as possible from COVID-19 outbreaks and compliant with local rules and regulations. As such, we’re excited to announce that we’ve recently launched our new Workplace Reservations Feature within TOPdesk, which also includes Workspace Booker.

Now, you can easily identify who’s going to be in the office, when, and pre-book a workplace before you decide to head in. Let’s dive into why we released this feature and explore its many benefits before taking you through the process of setting up workspace reservations within your own business.

Why workspace reservations are more important than ever

COVID-19 has had a profound impact on business as usual, significantly disrupting normal ways of working. However, all around the globe organizations have opened up their offices to part of their workforce. That said, there are usually a number of caveats—specifically, a limit on the number of people who can be in the office at any one time. This is logical. After all, the more people who are in the office, the likelier it is that the virus will spread.

This leaves facility managers and functional application managers in an unenviable position. How can you ensure that there are never too many people in the office at one time? And how can your colleagues ensure that if they do come in, there’s space in the office—and a meeting room available for that all-important catch-up?

Implement workspace reservations easily in your TOPdesk environment. If you already have reservations management, then you’re good to go. You can easily identify how many people are in the office, see which workspaces are currently booked, and book workspaces for upcoming slots. And if there is an outbreak of COVID-19, you can easily identify who might be affected (i.e. who was there at the same time), so you can tell them to self-isolate without having to put the entire company on hold.

But there’s another wider social benefit to our Workplace Reservations feature. Right now, we all have to pull together in the fight against the virus—one person’s actions can have a profound (and potentially fatal) knock-on effect on hundreds of others. Therefore, we need to ensure that there are as few people travelling into work each day and that commuter trains are kept as empty as possible.

With Workplace Reservations, you can easily identify if there’s space for you to go into the office before you turn up at the doorstep and find out it’s full. Let’s wave goodbye to unnecessary commuting and ensure that as few people as possible are taking public transport on a daily basis.

What are the benefits?

Aside from helping curb the spread of the virus, there are multiple benefits that our users can enjoy from our new Workplace Reservations feature.

• Short and simple set-up: Follow the steps outlined below, or visit the setup manual knowledge item within My TOPdesk for more information.
• No new systems: Don’t worry about buying and integrating a brand new system into your existing workflow. Instead, simply handle all reservations within the TOPdesk platform itself.
• Clear overview: Instantly see who’s reserved which workspace, when, and for how long.

What features are still in development?

We’re proud of what has been made possible so far, but there are still more features in the works. Most importantly, we’re currently working on improving our mobile solution, which will allow you to instantly manage your workspace reservations from your mobile device. We will also be adding a range of exciting filters to the mobile booker—for example, we will allow you to find specific workspaces for your department and for your area of the building.

How to book a workspace in TOPdesk

It’s incredibly easy to reserve a workspace in TOPdesk—simply follow these steps:

1. Create an asset template for workspaces if you currently have not registered workspaces in TOPdesk.
2. Or, migrate your current workspaces to asset management.
3. Make sure the workspace assets contain the Assignment and Reservations widgets.
4. You also need to ensure that the assets are reservable for both operators and personas.
5. Clarify that the workspace assets are assigned to the correct building/branch, and that the time is correct.
6. If a service window is in use, then apply the service window to both the operators and self-service portal users.
7. If a workspace is restricted to certain end-users, set the asset as reservable for a specific person or group containing only these end-users.

However, you may well want to set up additional functionality, like giving your employees the ability to book 2 weeks in advance, to limit each employee to 1 reservation per day, or to assign certain workspaces to certain departments. If you’d like to learn more about how to implement this within your company, we strongly recommend you speak to one of our expert consultants.

Manage your workplace with ease

Under the current circumstances, Reservations Management is arguably one of our most important features for.

Stay in complete control of your office environment by allowing remote booking. Let your colleagues come in as and when needed, but make sure they’re kept as safe as possible when they do turn up. Handle all reservations seamlessly from TOPdesk without having to integrate other systems. Manage your workplace not only with ease, but also with confidence.

Want to get started? Watch our recorded webinar 

In our Workplace Reservations webinar, we'll show you:

• how to set up TOPdesk to enable workspace reservations, including standard cleaning services and block times between reservations
• how to set up your self-service portal to comply with social distancing measures.
• tips and tricks for how to get the most out of Reservations Management.

Watch the webinar recording