Book Any Space in the Modern Workplace With Skedda

“Magnet—not mandate.” A positive employee experience is critical to getting teams into the office. People want to return to an office that helps them work better. Ensuring people can book exactly what they need to be productive before entering the door will significantly boost that experience.

In today’s dynamic workplace, organizations face the challenge of coordinating flexible team schedules while ensuring employees have all the resources necessary for optimal productivity when in the office. In this first edition of Patrick’s Product Picks, we share how Skedda’s Space Attributes let you book any space in the modern workplace. Let’s dive in.

(Prefer this content in video? Watch the webinar on-demand.)

Understanding Spaces & Space Attributes

Spaces in the modern workplace can mean various things—desks, meeting rooms, parking, labs, robots, equipment, and more. Your employees need easy access to all these in the office to do their best work. With Space Attributes, finding the perfect space has never been easier. This feature helps you describe and categorize your spaces in more detail according to three different attributes:

• Use the Space Tag attribute to create custom tags (i.e., standing desk, double monitor) that allow you to determine the best way to navigate your workspaces.
• Use the Type attribute to inform people whether the space is a desk, a meeting room, a parking space, or another built-in type of space.
• Use the Capacity attribute to show how many people the space can accommodate.

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Space Attributes make it easy for your teams to wayfind and know the resources they can book. Employees can quickly locate the ideal spot and necessary resources to do their best work—minimizing hassle and maximizing efficiency. You can also quickly pull reports to see how your space is used.

Booking Desks

Booking a space may mean a desk. In the modern workplace, people may share hot desks or more permanent assigned desks. 

Arranging Desks into Office Neighborhoods

Creating office neighborhoods is a great way to arrange your seating. Office neighborhoods can be dedicated to particular departments, job functions, project needs, or equipment requirements. They organize your workspace so employees sit next to each other based on similar work or shared needs. For example, you can designate a quiet zone for heads-down work or an area for sales teams to make calls.

When people go into the office, most of them go in for the full workday. Instead of adjusting their booking period every time they book a desk, people can choose ‘All-day booking’ when booking their desks to easily reserve the full hours of allotted availability.

Describing Workspaces Using Space Attributes

In these workstations, you’ll have different resources that people need. Some may be standing desks, and some may have dual monitors. You can describe these spaces with text or pictures when creating these spaces. You can also create space tags like ‘Dual Monitors,’ ‘Double Meeting Rooms,’ ‘EV Cars,’ ‘Standing Desks,’ and more to describe these bookable spaces in more detail.

People can filter spaces using space tags to see what they need quickly. For example, you can filter for dual monitors by clicking on the ‘Dual Monitor’ space tag and seeing which desks show up for them on the interactive map.

Creating Assigned Desks That Aren’t Bookable

You may have spaces you don’t want to be bookable but still want to show on the interactive map. For example, a printer station that doesn’t change regularly and shouldn’t be bookable. You may also have people who go into the office more full-time and want more permanent seating.

You can solve both of these situations with Skedda’s Assigned Spaces. As an admin, you can assign a space to a team member. On the interactive map, this space will have a lock icon indicating it is an assigned space and will not be bookable by anyone else.

Booking Meeting Rooms

Booking a space may mean a meeting room. Space Attributes are also handy here. You can designate meeting rooms using the Type attribute or create a ‘Meeting Room’ space tag for meeting or conference rooms. Team members can easily find them by filtering for the ‘Meeting Room’ space tag, which grays out all areas that are not meeting rooms.

Skedda also streamlines coordinating meetings with team members. The integrations with Microsoft and Google allow space bookings to sync with calendar schedules. When someone books a meeting room in Skedda, it will appear on team members’ Outlook or Google calendars. 

Adding attendees to your meetings is simple when you have these integrations. You can search for team members within your directory and choose who to invite when booking a meeting room in Skedda. The appointment will go into the calendars of all invitees. Skedda’s two-way sync functionality means that changes will be reflected on all platforms and updated in real time, so you stay updated and double-booking-free.

Booking Resources

Have shareable lab equipment and resources among team members? Booking a space can also mean booking these resources. To do that, you need to create spaces for them and tag them accordingly.  Like desks and meeting rooms, you can describe these equipment spaces with pictures and additional information. For example, you can include the contact responsible for maintenance in the description so people know who to contact if there’s an issue. 

Booking shared resources follows the same process as booking desks and meeting rooms. You need to label your spaces with the resource name and add any applicable Space Attributes so people know what they’re booking.

Booking Parking Spots

Booking a space may mean a parking spot. Like other bookings, you create a space for each parking spot. If you have multiple parking lots, you can designate them as different offices that people can view in the interactive floor plan and use space tags to denote various parking resources (e.g., EV chargers, compact cars).

💡 Tip: Instead of drawing a custom map of the parking lots, you can create a shortcut for booking parking spaces by simply having a total number of bookable spaces. For example, you have parking spaces across five different levels in one lot, and you know the total number of spaces. If it doesn’t matter which space people get, you can just set up the spaces as one office.

Understanding Booking Rules and Permissions

The actual process of booking any space is the same. However, you can decide who can book where and give priority booking access to specific spaces. Our custom rules and roles engine is a huge part of what makes Skedda so powerful. It allows you to customize your bookings and automate your workload even with complex bookings. For instance:

• Booking conditions define how and when users can book.
• Booking window limits how far in advance users can make bookings, ensuring fair access and optimal planning.
• Buffer time sets time gaps between consecutive bookings.
• Repeat bookings automate recurring reservations.
• Quotas limit the usage of spaces (by individuals or groups) within a given time to ensure various teams or roles can book these spaces.

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💡 Tip: There are generally two ways we see organizations approach rule setting:

1. Having a clear-cut rule for who can book where and when. You can see the rules, such as if someone is not on a team, they’re not allowed to book certain spaces at any time.
2. Giving priority to certain spaces. You make it so the marketing team gets priority in booking an area for the next three months. Anybody else can use it as a spillover if their area is full or it’s a day that the marketing team doesn’t work in the office.

Admin Insights and Utilization Tracking

Skedda also provides space use analytics through the Insights Dashboard. Here, you can see your space utilization rate, number of bookings, number of users, and busiest time. This data is useful for understanding how your space is used better and informs decision-making for space changes. In the Insights Dashboard, you can look at your space use by:

• Time: Your insights are driven by the hours of availability you set in your settings. It’s not unusual for companies to allow people to book from 6 am to 10 pm, but most people are likely booking within normal working hours, 9 to 5. You can change the hours of availability in your settings to see a more accurate utilization rate of your working hours.
• Space tags: You can use space tags to dive into the details of how specific spaces are used. Filtering by space tags lets you see information like the use of meeting rooms at a particular office or the number of desks being used, which provide insights for your general leasing.
• User tags: This filter works well if you have determined only a specific user group should be able to book certain spaces. If you find use is low for that group at certain times, you could tweak the rules and open it up to other people.

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Real-World Examples

Some of our best booking ideas we get from our customers. See how these two very different organizations—one an animation studio and the other a science research facility—use Skedda in innovative ways to manage their workspace and shared resources.

Case Study: Brown Bag Films

Brown Bag Films is a creative-led animation studio based in Dublin, Ireland. They’ve produced some of the most well-known children’s animated shows and films seen by millions of kids worldwide, including Octonauts and Peter Rabbit. They employ hundreds of animators, editors, and producers who make the magic come to life. 

For them, 90% of their desks are spaces that are available as shared spaces. They realized they needed a system to manage this that allowed for different types of users and spaces. Besides animators and creatives, they also have business and administrative teams with extremely different needs. They also have employees whose work equipment varies from two standard monitors with a keyboard and a mouse to a drawing table with an A4 drawing pad and a color-calibrated monitor.

Brown Bag Films uses over 20 user tags to identify a user’s desk requirements. For example, only users with the tag ‘Post’ can book desks with post-production editing hardware. And only users with the tag ‘Finance’ can book desks in a private room that allows a team to talk through sensitive topics. The system enables team members to hit the ground running with all the necessary equipment wherever they choose to work, making productivity soar.

Case study: The National Robotarium

On the outskirts of Edinburgh, Scotland, The National Robotarium provides a modern facility dedicated to expanding the robotics footprint in the UK. The organization operates as both a research and learning center and an incubator for exciting new startups in the robotics space. At any given time, they have scientific experts, robot engineers and technicians, project and business managers, startup founders, and visitors all sharing the same space.

They needed a solution for different types of users and spaces to help approved managers book hot desks and labs and access tools and machinery like their robots. For example, only a subset of the Robotarium’s employees have the technical skills to use the engineer labs, so an ‘Engineer Team’ tag is required to book those. In this case, spaces are much more than meeting rooms and desks. They include specialty printers, labs, tour bookings, and robots. One of the most sophisticated humanoid robots—Ameca—currently lives at the Robotarium.

The insights panel allows them to track workspace analytics over time to ensure space decisions are based on building occupancy and use. These critical insights provide investors with updates on how the building is used to help them see their return on investment.

Looking to transform the way your organization manages bookable spaces? Speak with a workplace expert to start booking space in the modern workplace.