Our Desk Booking feature has worn a few different outfits since we created Team Today. We’ve developed it, sculpted it, and moulded it into the brilliant feature it is now, listening to our customers as we go and taking on board their ideas and feedback. It stands tall with Whereabouts, Holidays and Work Planner, as one of the four pillars that make Team Today what it is.

At its simplest level, Desk Booking allows you to keep track of office space and see how many desks are available. But it’s so much more than that. It’s a fully flexible system for office management.  Whether you only need to manage your whereabouts, or whether you need to use the feature for specific desk booking, Team Today lets you configure the system to suit your needs.

In this feature focus, we’re going to dive in and look at some of the ways our Desk Booking feature works with Microsoft Teams to help you manage hybrid working.

Before We Begin

Team Today integrates with the other programmes you use in the course of your work, so that it weaves into your business as if it’s always been there. This includes Microsoft Teams. In fact, it integrates with Teams so you don’t have to leave the Teams interface to use it.  

If you’re using Microsoft Azure you can add starters and leavers as you normally would in Active directory, and Team Today automatically imports them.

And not forgetting Outlook and Google, Team Today integrates with those too.

Office Management

Letting team members book into the office and keeping track of numbers in the office might be enough for some. Others might want more detail, to see who is where and when. We recognise businesses and their needs vary, so Team Today has a number of options to make it work for you, from setting up multiple offices to creating custom locations.

Why Do It?

To set up your office(s), head to the Management tab. This is where the magic happens. Here you can manage users, teams, holidays, whereabouts, and offices.  

We’ve made creating a new office as simple as entering your office name, postcode, and number of desks. From there, you can tailor it to your business. Within each office, you can establish floors, bookable areas and bookable desks. Team Today allows you to name everything uniquely so it is specific to what you need it for, and to add how many desks are available. So as an example, maybe your design team needs to be together. You can create a bookable area just for them. Or perhaps you’ve got colleagues who need to sit at a specific desk when they come to the office. Again, you can create a named bookable desk for them.
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A Bit About Desks

Once your office set-up is complete, booking desks and spaces is easy for team members. It can all be handled in Whereabouts and the information goes straight into the Planner so you can see who is where. Desk bookings are also instantly added to your Outlook.

In your Management tab, you can add the number of available desks for offices and floors, and when colleagues go to book space, Team Today will show them the number of desks available, which will help to manage numbers and to ensure you don’t have any overbooking. Desk availability can be changed at any time.

Office overviews and desk availability can also be found in your Company tab under ‘Office View’, which will show you the information for each office, including who is booked in.  

And we’ve added a function to allow users to highlight up to three desks as their favourites, so they can come back to them easily without having to search again when booking.

Interactive Floor Planning

To facilitate a fully flexible and comprehensive desk booking experience for you, we offer an interactive floor planning service. A visual way to see who is booked into the office on a given day, and where they are sitting. Our Floor Plan feature enables you to see at a glance where your colleagues are and when they are booked in. It lets you book your own desks and workspaces, and you can zoom in and out of the interactive map. All you need to do is provide a floor plan to us at Team Today and we will turn it into an interactive floor map, free of charge. This could be a simple sketch, Excel mockup or a fully-fledged schematic. You can have multiple offices with multiple floors, each with their own floor plan. For businesses who need to make full use of Desk Booking, the interactive map is a really helpful feature.

A Bit About Roles

It isn’t just your colleagues’ names that will show up when they book into a space, but whether they fulfil a regulatory or compliance role as well. When viewing the office information, it will tell you if there is a Key Holder, Fire Warden, First Aider, or Mental Health First Aider in the office, including who they are, and if you’re using the interactive floor plan, where they are sitting. So, you can be assured you’re meeting health and safety requirements and looking after your staff.

It's More Than Desks

Our Desk Booking feature is a core tool to help you manage the office element of your hybrid working schedule. With its fully flexible options for managing offices, floors, and desks, and by allowing colleagues to view who will be working where, you can use it to plan times in the office to best suit working commitments and to ensure it is conducive to a productive working environment. By helping managers to ensure those with specific health and safety responsibilities are present in the office, it enables you to adhere to your compliance responsibilities, and the option to have interactive floor plans designed for your company means you have a bespoke, fluid and flexible way to manage your offices virtually.

Now you’ve been introduced to this feature, why not have a look at our other features here. And remember you can always contact us with any questions or to arrange a demo at hello@team-today.com.