Problem: Too many faculty & staff, not enough desks
The Royal Docks School of Business and Law (RDSBL), one of the schools within the University of East London (UEL), provides a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses for students from all walks of life—and in topics ranging from Criminology to Airline Management to Business Administration and Law.
RDSBL prepares its students for the ever-changing world. They provide practical and immersive classroom experiences and give them unique access to professors and educators. Every undergraduate student at UEL is paired with a personal tutor, and professors regularly hold office hours during which students can get 1:1 support.
When RDSBL recently moved into a new state-of-the-art building, they suddenly had more faculty than office space.
“The University expanded so we have more staff than ever before. We implemented hot desking for faculty and staff, so professors no longer have private office spaces in which to conduct office hours and tutoring sessions,” remarked Caroline Purcell, the Lead for Deans Projects at Royal Docks School of Business and Law
They needed a system to manage their new ways of working that was:
- Easy to use: Moving to a hot desking system had been unpopular with faculty.
- Simple for both students and faculty: Now that professors are moving around instead of sitting in their assigned offices, students need to have an easy way to find their tutors.
- Saves time for staff: With the shift to hot desking, it was essential that whatever system they onboarded did not create more administrative work for staff.
- Supported different user types: The RDSBL campus has a different set of users coming in for the summer months, and the system needed to handle that level of complexity well.
Faced with the need to manage meeting spaces for professors, students, and tutors, UEL turned to Skedda.
“Shifting our way of working was challenging,” Purcell remarked, adding “We needed something so easy, it gave faculty no choice but to adopt the system.”
Solution:
The Royal Docks School of Business and Law uses Skedda to facilitate their meeting room scheduling, allowing academics to meet with students for pre-scheduled 1:1s or during their weekly office hours. The meeting rooms are also quiet and peaceful spaces to which lecturers can retreat in between classes and get work done.
Several key features of Skedda made UEL’s decision a no-brainer:
1. Easy user experience (UX)
Skedda’s easy-to-use UX made it simple to onboard faculty and staff. Faculty and staff can quickly and easily book the rooms they need from their mobile devices or computers.
“It’s easy, it’s quick, and it just works. The system is so intuitive, it was easy to get the system up and running,” said Purcell.
2. Tablet Support and Map View
RDSBL uses tablet displays outside of their individual meeting rooms to demonstrate availability and to make it even easier for faculty to book open meeting rooms. Skedda’s support for tablets includes useful color coding that makes identifying available rooms at a glance.
“You can be walking around the floor and see at a distance if a room is vacant or not,” said Purcell.
With Academics moving all around RSSBL, they needed a way for students to easily find their professors. Skedda’s interactive floorplan was a perfect vehicle through which students could see where exactly in the building their professor was sitting.
“We have a big screen in a central public area, so when students are looking for their academics they can just go to the screen, look at the Skedda map, and see where they are,” mentioned Purcell.
3. Admin controls: Single Sign-On (SSO), Calendar Sync, Admin Booking, & Check-in functionality
Skedda’s compatibility with SSO also makes it simple for faculty and staff to set up their accounts. They can opt into syncing their bookings with their Microsoft Outlook calendar, and invite collaborators—whether it be students or other faculty members. This results in significant time savings for staff.
“The academics know where they need to be and do not need to rely on staff to book their spaces,” said Purcell.
Additionally, booking admins within Skedda have special privileges that allow certain administrators to manage longer bookings for faculty. This ensures every professor has a space during their selected office hours and students can get as much in-person face time with professors as possible.
Lastly, Skedda’s Check-in functionality has helped RDSBL staff manage the cultural shift to hot desking.
“We had a culture where people had their own offices, and now no one has their own office,” said Purcell, adding, “In the beginning, we found that some people were block-booking a meeting space for long periods and not using it for the entire duration or not showing up altogether.”
Skedda’s Check-In functionality helped combat the ghost booking behavior to ensure that empty rooms were available for others to use.
4. User Tags
Over the summer, UEL often has partner organizations use the campus while students are off on summer holidays. Skedda’s user tags allow Admins to give partner organizations access to their booking platform during the time that they are using RDSBL facilities, and allows them to easily remove these users once the term starts again.
Result:
With Skedda, RSSBL faculty and staff can now manage shared resources effectively. They can quickly book meeting rooms, and find each other on interactive floorplans, facilitating their mission of preparing students for the world.
What’s more, the University of East London expanded Skedda to multiple departments of the university. They use Skedda to manage event spaces for the Stratford Youth Zone, a partnership with the London Borough of Newham, to boost cultural and creative opportunities for young people led by students and staff from UEL’s School of Arts and Creative Industries.
They also adopted Skedda at the Royal Docks Centre for Sustainability, a space focused on sustainable innovation and collaboration between businesses, students, and residents of the Royal Docks area. There, students, staff, and local businesses can book co-working spaces, labs, and boardrooms.