The Future of Workplaces
So many questions come to our minds when we talk about our future workplaces:
- What will the workplaces of tomorrow be like?
- With whom?
- How will they be organized?
One thing we know for sure: the workplace of the future requires strong management and leaders who are ready to start thinking differently today.
Have you heard of hybrid working? In the past two years, this model has been hailed as the future of office work.
Generally speaking, hybrid work means greater flexibility for employees and the ability to decide where to work from depending on the circumstances.
Most commonly, a hybrid workplace is one that allows employees to work partly from home and partly from the office. Ever since the Covid-19 pandemic hit us, and after an initial WFH period for everyone, this became the norm for most of us who do office work.
When we at Proxiad realized that we won’t be going back to the office any time soon, we downsized our current office space and started looking for a new location that was better suited to the hybrid work model that we were switching to.
But remote work isn’t necessarily new to everyone. Another hybrid option that some companies offer to their employees is to freely select which of their locations to work from: this is a model that actually predates the pandemic and gained popularity during the “digital nomad” boom of the 2010s.
What are the benefits of hybrid work?
Hybrid work has many benefits: for example, it can give employees increased autonomy and opportunity to combine their private life more effectively with work, it can also decrease costs time spent commuting. It also increases individual productivity, as some people work better at home alone, while some perform better in a social setting.
From a management point of view, hybrid work opens new opportunities for hiring outside the local job market, and to scale up or down without all the hassle.
And what about the challenges?
Visibility of office utilization is especially important to keep track of: If a hybrid workplace isn’t managed and overseen properly, it could become underutilized and if there’s no historical data to show usage over time, there would be no way to tell.
At the same time, the exact opposite problem may be just as bad: if there’s no tool for efficient planning and employees decide to come on the same day, this overcrowding may become a health hazard.
We faced the same challenges while planning the switch to our new office and had to figure out how to solve them: this is what inspired us to develop a solution for managing hybrid workspaces which is called Desk Buddy. It helps management make decisions about our office space based on real data, and it helps our employees book a desk/conference room/parking spot in a matter of seconds.
Desk Buddy helps us solve the above-mentioned challenges by making sure that the office is not overcrowded by reducing the number of bookable desks, and giving employees real-time visibility when making a reservation.
Another key feature is hot desking for parking spaces, where parking spaces are shared flexibly between all employees. Its features also include a meeting room scheduling system.
Desk booking solutions are the best way to adapt to hybrid work and still create stability and certainty for employees. When more space is available to create activity-based zones for team building, collaboration, networking and workshop activities, employees will have more areas to choose from that fit their specific needs at the moment. Creating an office environment that is equipped to manage the task at hand plays a vast role in increasing employee engagement and productivity. 
Here are the main benefits of a workplace management system like Desk Buddy:
- It helps you make your workplace as efficient, safe and welcoming as possible
- It gives you visibility over redundant office space and how to decrease overall facility costs
- It helps your team to get more from their workdays through speedy booking for conference rooms and personal spaces they may need.
- Employees can control their work-life balance more effectively
- Increased employee engagement and productivity
Explore more about why hybrid workplaces need office management software.
