.webp)
71% of Trent & Dove employees report positive feedback to Skedda roll out.
Located in Burton on Trent in the West Midlands, Trent & Dove is a non-profit organization that seeks to make a tangible difference in people’s lives and reduce homelessness in their region. They achieve this by providing affordable homes and a wide array of supportive services that enable people and communities to thrive.
Adapting to a hybrid work model
After the COVID-19 pandemic, Trent & Dove returned to the office in a hybrid model. At first, they used Outlook to reserve desks and rooms, but found that the system led to some confusion. Often, people did not know the location or the size of the room they were booking. The administrative team also needed to learn how different spaces were being used.
“Before Skedda, we did not have a digital map of the office layout for room bookings. The team relied on descriptions and that led to inefficient use of resources as people booked rooms that were too large or did not have the amenities they needed." - Emma Cantrill-Jones, IT Project Manager at Trent & Dove
The team realized they needed a more sophisticated system that:
- Had way-finding functionality
- Allowed them to customize permissions and roles for their teams
- Integrated with their existing tech stack and was easy to use
- Gave the team a sense of how spaces were being used
A solution fit for their needs
Skedda provided a well-priced solution that met Trent & Dove’s needs. Skedda’s easy-to-use interface, its native integration with Microsoft Teams (especially chat), and its custom pricing for NGOs quickly beat out the competition. Skedda enabled Trent & Dove to fully embrace hybrid work.
Custom floor plans
Trent & Dove’s first step was to develop how the organisation would use Skedda through its custom floor plans. “The process of setting up Skedda helped us re-organize our office and think about how different teams would interact with the platform,” said Emma.
The organisation found that Skedda’s well-designed floor plans could also work for wayfinding. Trent & Dove added printers, bathrooms, and stairs to the maps. For new employees, Skedda provided them a great solution to find their way around the building. The rest of the team appreciated the addition of bathrooms on floor plans as well as amenity information on conference room booking pages.
Employees love being able to add their profile pictures to Skedda and see pictures of their co-workers on the platform to see who’s coming in for the day.
Rules and Permissions
Trent & Dove also created a robust set of rules to set access controls across the office. For instance, team leads determined that sitting close together and collaborating was important. So, the organisation set up rules that allowed team leads to easily book entire team rooms within the office, known as “hubs.” This means that with a few clicks a team leader can reserve an entire space for their team.
Trent & Dove uses Skedda’s user tags—which enable the administrative team to grant a set of permissions to certain users—to designate team members who can reserve certain rooms for more confidential meetings, such as interviews and family meetings. For example, the system only allows users with the tag “customer service” to book these meetings and protects sensitive information from regular users.
Integrations: Microsoft Teams & MS365
Skedda's integration with Microsoft Teams sealed the deal for the team at Trent & Dove. The team uses the chat application to communicate every day. With Skedda's native integration with MS Teams, users book desks and conference rooms from the app they already use every day.
“The integration with MS Teams has been helpful. We already use Teams every day, it’s already on our computers, and once they’re logged in they can immediately use Skedda. Employees did not have to learn a new system, resulting in a 70% user adoption rate,” said Emma.
Insights informed decisions
For the first time, Trent and Dove can see exactly how their space is used, and they can make decisions about their layout based on how employees are using it.
“For managers, it is really important to see how often team members are coming in,” said Emma. For the administrative team, having utilization insights into the office helps them make space design decisions.
“Skedda helps us create a balance of supply and demand and understand what the right balance of desks versus meeting rooms versus team hubs are. We no longer find ourselves in situations where people cannot find a desk,” added Emma.
A couple of months into using Skedda, Trent & Dove wondered if they should transform one of their meeting rooms into another team hub. This would mean replacing the conference room layout with a group of desks so that an entire team could work from that room on any given day. Before making the move, the organisation wanted to make sure that the room had low usage.
Through Skedda’s utilization insights, Emma was able to determine that the room was regularly used, and much more so than the team believed from anecdotal evidence. Eliminating the room would negatively impact the office. The team scrapped the plan and avoided a meeting room supply/demand disaster.
Simplified processes, satiated sweet tooths, & satisfied employees
Trent & Dove experienced rapid success with Skedda. “Everyone really likes using Skedda. It's quite self-explanatory and not laborious or hard to understand,” Emma said.
For launch day, Emma prepared a presentation that included a helpful onboarding video made by their Skedda onboarding manager and distributed sweets on bookable desks to encourage employees to reserve their spots.
Two months after the implementation of their new workplace management platform, Trent & Dove surveyed employees on the Skedda experience. “I loved the sweets for launch day!” wrote Jennifer, the former Head of Supported Housing.
“Skedda is super easy to use, really quick to log in, easy to make a booking and the instructions are clear. A much-improved system compared to our old one” wrote Helen, a Housing Development Project Manager.
The survey revealed employees especially love the ability to see who is in the office with profile photos on the map. They also enjoyed how easy it is to use the UI. Most tellingly, over three-fourths of employees’ surveys signaled satisfaction with the move to Skedda.
