The Rendezvous Reverse Hoteling feature is designed to fully maximize office space and desk utilization, while offering complete flexibility and ease of use. It allows staff, within groups if required, to release desk or office space on days that they are not working from the office, with the control vested in the owner of the space. Reverse hoteling is a reality for many firms today, who are more comfortable with the concept of allocated space, that can be released in a controlled manner – it’s already proving a great success with our legal clients such as Bryan Cave.
What is Reverse Hoteling?
Reverse hoteling gives you the freedom to fully manage your office and desk space and get the maximum return on your real estate budget. Thanks to this new reverse desk hoteling software feature you can now re-allocate normal desks to your hot desking pool on an ad hoc basis easily using our QuickBook app or through the desktop.
Once re-allocated the desk space can be booked as easily as a normal hot desk as to all intents and purposes that is what it is. Let’s see how it works in practice.
For example, John goes on vacation for two weeks. Rather than letting that valuable office real estate go to waste, you can make John’s desk available to book as a hot desk until he returns when it will be reallocated back to him. In the meantime, colleagues can book the desk like any other hot desk, using the mobile meeting room booking app.
The reverse hoteling feature is also great for fostering collaboration and the cross-fertilization of ideas across different teams as fixed desks can be released in a way that forces staff to mix across job functions.
As well as giving you freedom over how your office space is utilized, the reverse hoteling for desk feature helps with your corporate space utilization strategy. For example, those corner spaces and offices that would otherwise be unused can be commandeered thanks to the reverse hoteling feature to ensure that staff can book quiet space in the office if required while you achieve the best corporate occupancy you can.
Easy and flexible to use (yet highly configurable)
All our desk, space, room and meeting scheduling software solutions are designed with ease of use and flexibility in mind. Our reverse office hoteling feature is no exception and is available in both our intuitive desktop web application and our QuickBook desk booking mobile app. Whichever option for reverse hoteling you choose you can be guaranteed that you will get a fully featured solution.
The hoteling desk space solution is very flexible to configure with options to create booking groups so, for example, secretaries can reallocate multiple office desks – a great time saver. By way of example, in a law firm, this would typically mean they could take responsibility for reallocating a bank of fee earners’ desks when not in use.
Using the web app it’s a simple process to make a desk available with an easy drop down menu to replicate the process across multiple desks. Reverse hoteling that is as easy as 1,2,3.
Once the desk is available it becomes instantly free for anyone to book either from the web app or QuickBook.
Similarly, if you no longer want to grant access to your desk – maybe your vacation has been cancelled – it’s easy to delete desk availability using QuickBook, the dedicated Rendezvous mobile reverse hoteling app.
As the reverse desk hoteling solution is fully integrated with Outlook, once the desk is removed from the desk pool, anyone who had booked the desk is automatically notified, as well as any bookings cancelled in the system – a great time saver and one less worry for the admin team!
Reverse hoteling in the modern workplace: who will benefit
If this is the sort of functionality you want to introduce for your office, you need to consider who will benefit from it. Employees work in many different ways. Different employees also spend different amounts of time at their desk during a typical workday. There is no one size fits all approach and reverse hoteling is used in workplaces with a mix of assigned and unassigned desks with staff who spend varying amounts of time at their desks (or very rarely at all). You may find the following types of employees and their use cases for office hoteling:
1. Resident employee
- They will have an assigned desk
- Spends more than 5 hrs at a desk (based on an 8-hour workday)
- Usually this desk allocation makes up 20% of an organization
- They typically offer their desk to the flexible desking pool
2. Flex employee
- Sometimes uses assigned desks or not depending on their role
- Spends between 1.5 to 5 hrs at a desk each day
- Typically makes up 60% of the organization
- They can reverse hotel their desk when they are out of office or perhaps benefit from using different areas in the office by booking a desk in the shared pool
3. Remote worker
- They don’t have an assigned seat. They are often found in meetings, on the road, or working remotely
- Spends less than 20% of their time at an unassigned desk or less than 1.5 hours at a desk each day
- Typically makes up 20% of an organization
- Since they don’t have their own, they will benefit most from using and booking reverse hoteled flex desks when in the office
Sounds interesting?
Get in touch today to find out how we help you get the maximum return on your real estate – we have a full range of solutions for hoteling, space utilization and measurement.