Over the next few months, the majority of offices around the country will reopen for the first time since COVID started. This past year of remote work has forced us to reevaluate the purpose of having an office in the first place. That means the offices we’ll be returning to are certain to look and feel different than before.
In a hybrid world, “one person, one desk” will be the exception, not the rule.
As employers transition to their flavor of hybrid work, they’ll make decisions on the office layout and in-office experience they want to have going forward. As these decisions are made it’s natural for desks to be front-and-center.
Until COVID, individually assigned desks were the foundation of any office environment. In a hybrid world “one person, one desk” will be the exception, not the rule. From retaining some assigned desks to creating “neighborhoods” to "hoteling,” there are a variety of mix-and-match approaches companies will take to setting up their desks and office spaces.
These decisions, though, are about a lot more than just logistics. They can directly impact the daily experience for employees in ways that go far beyond answering “where will I sit” or making sure everyone has space.
How offices are evolving
If you’re following the emergence of hybrid work, you know there is already plenty of discussion and analysis out there about how offices will change. What I’ll do here is summarize some of the key factors, specifically in relation to how they impact decisions around desks, other seating, and the employee experience.
Reduction in footprint
Many companies have or will be downsizing their office footprint as more of their employees transition to hybrid or virtual-only work. For some, the success of remote work and the hybrid future resulted in valuable opportunities to reduce real estate costs.
The result of reducing footprint is the need to rethink how you allocate space within the office. Below are some of the key inputs in that equation:
What is the capacity of our office space now?
How often do we expect the average employee to come in?
Will we restrict that behavior in some way?
How many desks could we fit into the space if we wanted to?
How much non-desk space (shared tables, couches, etc.) do we want to provide?
The outputs of these questions will influence capacity controls and the number of desks the office can realistically accommodate.
Focus on collaboration
Another key factor influencing office design is how companies anticipate their teams working together in-person. Most employees cite collaboration and connectedness as the major reason for wanting to go back to the office [a few days per week]. That has led HR and Facilities leaders across the country to rethink what types of spaces they want to setup in their offices.
This evolution is very much tied to each company’s starting point - that is, the type of office layout and approach you had before. For example:
If before COVID you had cubicles and lots of individual offices, you might move toward a more open layout and/or fewer offices
If you worked in an open floor plan but most work happened at desks, you might create more “collaborative” space such as couches, tables, conference rooms, etc.
If you already worked in a “collaboration-oriented environment” but still had “one person, one desk,” you might shift to a majority of non-desk seating
Each situation is a little different, but the core theme is the same: downward pressure on individually assigned desks. This obviously has a big impact on how we think about office seating.
Physical distancing
The way we’ll approach distancing in the office has certainly evolved over the past ~6 months as timelines and vaccine distribution have shifted. Realistically, most companies are now expecting to not have much if any physical distancing in place when they return. This is based on the expectation that most employees will be vaccinated and/or wearing masks.
I’m not the person to say what will ultimately happen when the professional world really starts to “reopen.” What I do know is that even a small amount of distance required will put pressure on space availability and traditional desk setups.
These are the major factors affecting office planning, but certainly not all of them. That said, they’re all pointing toward the same priority needs: better space utilization and the ability to manage flexible capacity to create a productive work environment.
Enabling that type of office experience starts with a plan for where people will sit.
Types of seating: desk and non-desk
Most offices have historically consisted of a few default types of space:
Individually assigned desks / cubicles
Offices
Conference rooms
Common space (used primarily for eating, snacking, socializing, etc.)
The idea of your primary work location being anything other than your desk is pretty foreign to most office workers. That said, with the shift to more open offices and laptop-only work over the last decade (especially for tech companies) it became more common for folks to work from a couch or a kitchen table for a change of scenery. That was still the exception to the rule, however, before COVID, and nearly everyone still had an assigned desk.
As we move forward with a hybrid office environment, there will be new opportunities to define assigned seating that goes beyond desks.
For example, if you decide to expand your common area with tables or couches, it might be desired (or necessary) to allocate a specific non-desk space to an individual or team. Companies that go with this approach will unlock new ways to optimize space. It will break the historical mental model that desks are assigned and non-desks are open seating.
For purposes of planning, HR and Facilities leaders should be thinking about seating capacity in terms of desks and non-desk seating. That will inform the approach to assignment vs. reservations.
Assignments, availability, reservations, and capacity
Let’s start with some definitions…
Assignment: When we talk about assignment, we mean indicating who is eligible for a desk or non-desk — be it a specific person, team, or open assignment (anyone). Not every seat has to be assigned, of course! Assignment is a way of saying who can sit in a given place, be it a desk, a picnic table, or a couch. Assignments are determined by the employer themselves, and are an output of the floor planning effort.
Availability: Availability is the indication whether a specific seat (desk or non-desk) is available for an employee to sit in. Assignment and availability are closely related, but not the same, as an assigned seat may or may not have availability.
Reservation: In contrast to assignments, reservations are a consideration and task for the employee. They refer to the physical act of specifying where someone is going to sit, based the availability of that seat.
Capacity: Capacity is about making sure the right number of people can and do come into the office. It’s typical to think about capacity and desks as the same thing. That’s not the case. While they are related, they are not 1:1. As offices open up to more types of seating and experiences, it’s possible for the total capacity of an office to exceed the amount of assigned seats.
If you take a step back from the definitions, you’ll actually see the building blocks required to form a plan for office utilization and desks. That might look something like this:
First, figure out what the capacity of your building/floor is, based on the variables we talked about above.
Then, determine how much desk vs. non-desk seating capacity you want to have. For example, if your floor can fit 100 people, you might have 60 desks and 40 non-desk seats (whether assigned or not). Or, you might have 30 desks and 70 non-desk seats.
Once you have an idea of desk vs. non-desk counts, you can make determinations about what types of seating can be assigned. Do you want to assign desks only, or also non-desk space?
Finally, you can get all the way to the individual seat assignments, and outline the assignments you want on a person, department, or open basis.
You’ll notice we haven’t talked about reservations in the above steps, and that’s for good reason. Everything above is required work for the HR/Facilities team even before you start to think about reservations. If you’re sensing a theme, it’s this: reservations are an employee experience factor that comes after managing office layout and capacity. It’s separate from how you want to setup your office or assign desks/non-desks.
The obvious analogy here is a restaurant. Before you can open up, you need to figure out how many tables, what sizes, any bar seating, etc. before you figure out if you’re going to take reservations, walk-in only, or a mixture.
Types of seating assignment
Determining how to assign desks is definitely the most important step for an employer in optimizing the office experience. It will directly impact the type of environment and culture created on an organizational and team level. It often requires a specific understanding of both individual and department-specific needs and accommodations.
Below are the three most common types of seating assignments to understand and consider. (Note these can apply to both desks and non-desks.)
Individual assignment: the classic. A desk or non-desk space assigned to a specific person. This is what all offices have looked like historically, and going forward, there will certainly be needs for specific individuals to have their own desks assigned to them.
Team / department desks (aka “neighborhoods”): perhaps the most common “trend” in assignment will be allocation groups of desks to specific teams or departments to use. As people start coming in only a few days per week, this allows teams to continue collaborating together, while maintaining flex capacity and opportunities to share space. For example, team/department desks can be assigned to specific teams or even multiple teams to use and alternate on different in-office days.
Open seating: assigning a desk as “open” may seem counterintuitive, but it’s an important part of mapping out your office. This is because availability and assignment are different things! So a desk may be open to anyone to use, but you will still need to manage its availability so that two people don’t both try to sit there.
From these core assignment types, there are lots of ways to get creative. I already mentioned shared desks between departments and then rotating in-office days for departments. Another variant is including sharing desks between individually assigned employees.
Managing availability
Once seats have been assigned across desks and non-desks, there is still the question of managing availability. The hardest part is done once you figure out who can sit where. But, you still have to make sure that desks are accounted for each day (for those not individually assigned) so that you meet capacity requirements and don’t have confusion amongst employees.
This is typically when employers start to think about reservation systems. Now that you’ve assigned desks to people/teams, it seems natural to have employees “select” a specific desk to sit in. This feels familiar as reverts us back to something akin to “one person, one desk. The problem is, it puts the onus on the employee to figure out where they want to sit. And that means means more overhead added to the employee experience.
A potentially better approach is to automatically have a seat’s availability update when someone says they want to come in. You can do this without an employee taking the time to select a seat everyday. Here’s how it works:
The employee indicates they’re coming in [that’s it!]
Because you’ve already assigned desks, they know where they are eligible to sit (e.g. based on individual assignment, team affiliation, or open desks)
You automatically mark one of the desks assigned to that type of employee as taken
That’s it. No extra work on the part of the employee to figure out where to sit. Just like reservations, this is something you’ll need outside help to do. Fortunately, there are some great solutions and software out there for automated, non-reservation systems, like Scoop.
Here’s what that looks like in a more illustrative example: let’s say we have an employee, Frank. Frank is on the Marketing team and coordinates with the team that he wants to come in this Wednesday. There are six seats assigned to Marketing, so Frank knows he can sit in any of those six desks.
In a reservation model, he’d have to first indicate he was coming in, and then go to a map, look at the floor-plan, and pick a specific desk based on what was available. In a status-based approach, Frank just has to say he’s coming in. One available Marketing desk gets marked as “occupied,” capacity for the office goes up +1, and there are five more Marketing desks available. That’s it.
The difference might seem slight, but it has a big impact on Frank’s daily experience. And better yet, it keeps his experience in-line with typical human behavior and norms.
Optimizing for the employee experience
People are creatures of habit. We gravitate toward toward common routines and approaches to the tasks or responsibilities we take on everyday. It’s why if you brush your teeth before your hair, you do it everyday. And why you always pour your coffee before you make your breakfast. Or for nearly every university student, why we sit in the same seat everyday even when we no longer have assigned seats.
The big problem with desk reservations, is that they add a small but daily hurdle to the employee experience. And that hurdle feels more expensive since it ignores that employees form routines in the office just like in their daily lives.
Consider the daily experience of Frank in an office with desk reservations. Every day Frank wants to come into the office, he has to make sure he reserves his desk. That’s an extra decision and consideration he has to make, in addition to deciding whether to come in, understanding who else is coming in…you get my drift.
Let’s examine the ways that this might play out on a regular basis:
Frank takes the extra minute every day to go look and reserve his specific desk in the Marketing neighborhood. Best case scenario, it’s just an added step to deal with in order to come into the office. A minor annoyance.
What if Frank gets tired of doing this every day? So he starts reserving desks weeks in advance. Now he’s basically self-assigning a desk that was meant for others to use flexibly. He starts leaving stuff on his desk expecting to come back again to the same place, and he gets frustrated if someone else books it.
Or, maybe Frank just occasionally forgets to reserve his desk once in a while, showing up to the office to find out he doesn’t have a place to sit. Not good.
The theme here is that what feels like a small bit of friction actually starts to compound. Over time, you are liable to either reverse engineer an all-assigned seating situation, or generate a lot of little annoyances around the team around desks. Not very productive.
In a system where desk status is updated automatically when someone says they’re coming in, they don’t have to make any extra decisions. You can focus all your energy on the core “check-in” flow your office likely has (for health surveys, capacity management, team coordination, etc.) One task, not multiple.
In a status-updating system, capacity is still accounted for and space is ensured for each person who says they’re coming in. Best of all, Frank can select his desk in the real world! He can show up to the office, see who is there, see what’s available, and sit in one of the Marketing desks. No floor plan scrolling and no scrambling to book ahead.
The major upside is that this allows employees to focus on only one decision: am I planning to go into the office. After all, that single decision is the one that matter. It’s the one that impacts team collaboration and coordination, productivity, engagement, and all the other major factors of a successful hybrid organization.
Focus on the employee, and all else will follow
Maintaining a deliberate and consistent focus on what will create the best employee experience is likely going to be the best way to optimize for hybrid work. With each small decision, there is a chance to do what will help employees be most productive and engaged in this new environment.
This transition we’re going through is all about finding a more flexible way to work that can unlock even greater potential for organizations and their people. Each little hiccup or stumbling block matters, and finding ways to automate, accelerate, and improve the employee experience so they can take full advantage of in-office and at-home work is almost certain to be the key to success.
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Author’s note: Scoop has built some great solutions for Capacity and Attendance, including a fully automated desk and non-desk assignment and allocation solution. It’s a great platform for delivering a “people first” approach to hybrid work.