Best Practices for Booking & Managing Spaces With Skedda

Effectively booking and managing spaces isn’t just a convenience—it’s essential for productivity, collaboration, and employee satisfaction. As the modern office evolves, organizations must adopt smarter practices to make the most of their environments.

In our first Product Picks lesson, we explored how Skedda’s Space Attributes feature helps employees quickly find and book the right space with the right resources—whether they need a monitor, a standing desk, or even a robot to support their work.

In Lesson 2, we’re diving into Skedda’s powerful rules and roles engine, the secret behind operationalizing modern workplace policies to balance flexibility and control. It’s the layer that ensures your space management strategy reflects your unique workflows, people, and places—while giving your teams a seamless experience every time they interact with your office.

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The Shift from Hybrid Work to Modern Work

The term hybrid work served its purpose during the post-pandemic transition, but it doesn’t fully capture the complexity—or intentionality—of today’s workplace. Hybrid seems to mean simply “in-office two or three days a week.” But now, we see more nuanced patterns emerging. Some employees are in the office full-time. Others come in occasionally. Teams operate on different cadences depending on goals, location, and personal preferences.

This evolution marks the shift to modern work—a more mature phase where organizations lead with data, policies, communication, and technology to drive engagement and productivity. It’s no longer about trial and error. It’s about getting it right.

To support this, Skedda gives you the tools to bring your policies to life—no matter how complex. Whether you want to create booking rules by department, limit visibility across regions, or apply check-in requirements, Skedda’s rules and roles engine makes it easy.

Let’s walk through how it works in practice.

Desks: Flexibility and Booking Options

Skedda gives you complete flexibility in how you set up and manage your bookable desks. Using a custom interactive floor plan, you can visually designate different spaces with clear legends. For example, you can use different colors to designate:

• Quiet zones for focused work
• Collaboration areas for meetings
• Phone-friendly zones for calls
• Communal areas that aren’t bookable but useful to have on the map

Or, you can organize desks by team—marketing, IT, finance—using office neighborhoods.

You also have the choice between fully flexible booking times or all-day booking. Flexible booking allows employees to choose their hours every time they book. In contrast, the all-day booking option automatically designates the default work hours you have set for your venue (e.g., 9 am to 5 pm)

Pro Tip: If you want highly accurate utilization data, choose flexible time slots (e.g., half-hour increments). If simplicity is more important, default to all-day bookings.

💡 Admin Tip: To customize booking hours and defaults, go to Settings → Hours of Availability.

You can assign different time settings to different areas. For various spaces, you can choose whether All-day Booking is the default—and whether users can even change it.

Control Who Can See and Book Spaces

Skedda’s visibility and access controls give you complete authority over who sees what—and who can book it. For example, your EV charging stations or guest parking spots may only be visible to certain users. Or perhaps you have multiple offices in different locations that should operate independently with no cross-location visibility, but you want them all on the same venue for reporting purposes.

💡 Admin Tip: To customize visibility and access controls, go to Settings → Spaces and Attributes. Under Visibility Rules, decide if a space is visible to all users or only to users with specific tags.

Tags are key. They define user roles, teams, locations—any group you want to use for access control. You can create and manage tags, assign them to users, and then apply them to booking rules.

Want to restrict a sales team from booking desks in the finance area? No problem. Want to allow temporary access to another location during a site visit? Easy.

💡 Admin Tip: Use tags to create priority bookings for certain departments. Go to Settings → Conditions. There, you can determine which tags are allowed to book specific spaces. You can do this on a space-by-space basis. Additionally, you can add as many tags as you want. The robustness of the rules and roles engine allows you to define individual spaces with as much detail and accuracy as you need.

Pro Tip: To see a full list of your users and their tags, go to your User list. There, you can give users multiple tags to change their access to spaces.

Booking Windows and Future Booking Restrictions

Worried about users booking desks too far in advance and then not showing up? With Skedda, you can set future booking limits to manage fairness and encourage actual usage. For instance:

• Let specific teams book desks three weeks in advance
• Let other departments only book within a 3-day window
• Restrict desk bookings to 30 days in advance (but allow meeting rooms longer if needed)

These rules can be set per space, giving you fine-tuned control. For instance, you can exclude meeting rooms from these booking window restrictions as some employees may have standing meetings for the next six months.

Enabling Check-In to Prevent Ghost Bookings

Ghost bookings—spaces that are reserved but unused—are a huge inefficiency. Skedda helps solve this with check-in functionality. Users can check in:

• Via a confirmation email
• Through the Skedda mobile app
• Directly in Microsoft Teams, using the Skedda integration

If users don’t check in, their booking can be automatically released, making the space available again.

Check-in Best Practices:

• Apply check-in rules primarily to desks (not shorter meetings)
• For longer meetings, consider enabling check-in to validate use
• Combine check-in with Skedda’s Occupancy Tracking: When users connect to your Wifi and engage with the Skedda platform, they’re marked “seen on site” in Skedda’s List View

A note on Occupancy Tracking: Over time, we’re making this process autonomous—users won’t have to actively check in if their phone and the app are with them in the office.

Assigned Spaces and Points of Interest

There are two growing populations of employees—those who come into the office full-time and need permanent desks, and those who have more flexibility. In Skedda, you can easily assign employees who need permanent seating to a space and make that desk non-bookable to others. These Assigned Spaces appear visually on the map and in the List View. 

You can also use Assigned Spaces as points of interest like:

• Printers
• Restrooms
• Pet-friendly zones
• Info points with images or instructions

Assigned Spaces are not bookable, but they act like a directory to enhance awareness and navigation within the office. The flexibility with this is that you can quickly change any bookable space into an assigned space, and vice versa.

💡 Admin Tip: To convert a bookable desk to assigned: Settings → Spaces and Attributes → Change to Assigned Space.

⚠️ You’ll need to confirm the change, as changing a bookable space to an assigned one will delete all future bookings for that space. Make sure to export the information first before making this change if you need to keep the information for future records.

Pro tip: You can assign a desk to a new user in a single step without first adding them separately to the system. When choosing a space to be assigned, simply create the new user. After you fill out all the information, both the user and the Assigned Space will be created.

Meeting Rooms: Calendar Integration and Booking Sync

Like with desks, Skedda gives you complete flexibility in how you set up and manage your meeting rooms. You generally want meeting room bookings to be flexible, meaning setting them to be bookable in 15- or 30-minute increments, and do not allow all-day booking options.

Skedda integrates directly with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace so users can sync bookings to their calendars to streamline coordinating meetings with team members.

With two-way sync, meeting room bookings made in Skedda show up in Outlook or Google—and vice versa. After you set up this integration, the relevant information syncs between the apps, allowing you to:

• Add attendees directly from your directory
• Automatically send calendar invites and notifications
• Include video conferencing links for hybrid collaboration

Pro Tip: You can also configure your desk availability status (Free or Busy) when making a desk booking so coworkers can see where you’re sitting—either on your calendar or in Skedda.

Parking Spaces: Smarter Booking for a Hot Commodity

Parking is another common pain point that Skedda handles with flexibility. There are two common setups:

1. Designated spaces (e.g., “Space 27” in Lot B): You have a clearly defined parking lot where each space is designated.
2. General availability (e.g., “30 open spots” on Level 4): You have a certain number of spaces, but they aren’t assigned.

Your map will look different depending on how you handle parking spaces. If designated spaces are important to you, you may need a floor plan that aligns with your actual parking lot and clearly defined spaces. If you only care about general availability, you can set up a generic floor plan with just the number of bookable spots available.

Pro Tip: You can ask users to include car registration details via the “organization” field in their profile for cross-reference to ensure only people with the proper credentials can park in the space.

Parking Quotas:

Parking spaces tend to be highly sought after, so it’s good practice to set a quota. For example, you may create a rule limiting parking usage to three weekly bookings. Employees will receive an error message if they try to book a fourth day of parking that week.

💡 Admin Tip: Go to Settings → Quotas. You can make the rule as specific as you want. For instance, you can apply rules by user tags or specific spaces.

Smarter Space Utilization Insights

Skedda provides space use analytics through the Insights Dashboard, which now lets you drill down into:

• Specific days and times
• Tags (departments, roles)
• Overall booking behavior

This helps you understand not just who is using space, but how and when. It’s key to optimizing layouts, reducing waste, and making real estate decisions backed by data.

Manage Less, Empower More

Efficient space management isn’t about controlling people—it’s about empowering them.

By focusing on ease of use, flexibility, transparency, and data-driven decision-making, your workplace becomes more than a place to work—it becomes an enabler of great work.

Want to see how Skedda can help you create a workplace that’s not just organized, but optimized? Speak with a workplace expert and start transforming your spaces today.