Creating the perfect ‘Hangout’ with Skedda
When the COVID-19 pandemic forced all of their employees home, Autovista Group—Europe and Australia’s leading automotive data, analytics, and industry insights provider—had to rethink their relationship with their office spaces. Like many companies employing knowledge workers, Autovista asked themselves: what is the value of in-person work?
“Because of the type of work our employees do, we didn’t need a traditional space to come into, but there were still meetings requiring confidentiality and collaborative work that called for in-person gathering spaces.” - Vita Minas, Vendor Development Manager at Autovista
The solution was to transform Autovista’s office spaces into “Hangouts”— spaces where teams could gather for in-person meetings or meet up for short periods of collaborative work. Minas shared that the 8-hour day at the office was a thing of the past; instead, the future was a model where in-person time was highly intentional and dependent on specific work and employee needs.
Autovista found Skedda as they were implementing their new “Hangout” workspace model. They needed workplace management software that could be customized to match their unique needs. A “Hangout” was different from a traditional office space in the following ways:
- Support: Technical support would not be available daily.
- Time limits: Fewer spaces and meeting rooms meant that employees should not be spending more than four consecutive hours in any one Hangout space.
- Occupancy needs: Unlike an office, a Hangout space could go empty for days, so office managers weren’t needed daily.
- Adoption: They would need clear occupancy data to know whether the Hangout was being used. A system that integrated with their SSO, had interactive floor plans, and was easy to use was important.
Given these differences, Autovista needed a system that allowed them to organize permissions, set booking hours and booking rules, create automatic email notifications, and measure occupancy. Enter, Skedda!
A simple and customizable solution
Skedda’s fully customizable space booking system gives Autovista employees a simple solution that meets the unique needs of the new Hangout model.
Custom Fields: With Custom Fields, administrators can add unique intake fields to their booking forms which allow them to capture necessary information about certain bookings. Users can request tech support or catered lunch to ensure that in-person meetings go smoothly, and teams have everything they need to be successful.
Booking Conditions and Tags: Autovista’s office managers can set rules within Skedda to limit users to four-hour bookings. Skedda’s booking conditions ensure that users can only book spaces and times that are approved for use. Conditions are automated and save them hours admin work a day.
In addition, Autovista uses User Tags to organize additional permissions across teams. A User Tag is a label that can be attached to an individual user or a group of users. Once a user has tags, their Skedda experience will be dictated by the rules and policies that their admin has specified for this tag. For example, Autovista uses tags to designate who in each office is allowed to reserve the entire space.
Skedda Space sharing rules also enable them to close the Hangout on days when no one is coming into the office. A Space Sharing rule allows you to create rules for spaces that overlap or conflict, so one space can’t be booked if the other one is (and vice-versa). Autovista designated spaces that when booked by an admin, will make the rest of the office space unbookable, allowing them to close the offices when necessary with one simple click.
Insights Panel: What’s more, Skedda’s insights panel gives the team a look at robust analytics that let them determine how their space is being used. The value of the insights panel, led them to expand Skedda to other offices. The Insights feature is a rich, compelling, and fast analytics and reporting solution designed to empower an organization’s decision-makers.
Floor Plans & SSO: The interactive floor plans give users an accurate view of the office layout and let them see who else from their teams is using the space on any given day. Autovista uses SSO, to ensure that Skedda fits seamlessly into their employees’ existing work systems, allowing them to access their office space with the same log-in they use across their workspace.
Results
Workplace carbon footprint managed
Skedda was so accurate that Autovista implemented a rule that there must be a minimum of four people booked into a space for them to open the office that day. Minas and the other Hangout managers check Skedda bookings every night and freeze booking capabilities for the next day if fewer than four people have booked the space to save managers from having to travel to the office when someone makes a last-minute booking.
“Our company is ESG compliant, and we try to be as green as possible, so if just one person decides to come in and one of us has to be there for that one booking… that is not efficient environmentally or otherwise.” - Vita Minas, Vendor Development Manager at Autovista
With Skedda, Autovista can reduce its carbon footprint by decreasing unnecessary travel and managing its workplace energy consumption by opening the office based on employee demand.
Easy-to-use interface for simple user onboarding
Skedda provides a simple interface that all Autovista employees can use with little to no training.
“We announced we had this new booking system, and before we even released instructions—we only had the link in our intranet—I started getting notifications that people were making bookings. They didn’t need instructions. It was really easy to just jump on, log in through SSO, and start booking.” - Vita Minas, Vendor Development Manager at Autovista
Autovista saw such high adoption of Skedda that they now use bookings to determine when to open or close the office. After launching Skedda first at their London office and seeing the results, Autovista expanded their use of Skedda in their Bratislava, Frankfurt, Madrid, and Vienna offices.
“I can’t imagine how we would manage our space without a system like Skedda.”
