Hi all,
I’m excited to show you what OfficeTogether has been building over the last five months! I started this company in summer of 2020 in response to a growing number of companies making a hard pivot into hybrid office schedules. Hybrid offices allow employees to come in zero to five times per week, rather than daily attendance. The OfficeTogether software portal enables desk and capacity management, advanced scheduling and health checks. These features allow your teams to use less office space while still maintaining productivity and in-person connection. Let’s dive into some of the ways we are simplifying the operational overhead of flexible workplaces.
Advantage #1: Office Space Efficiency and Cost Savings
One of the key advantages of the hybrid office is space savings. To realize the space savings, your company is likely operationalizing “hotel desks” or shared, reservable workstations. In a traditional fixed-schedule office, an office with 100 desks would accommodate 100 employees. With a hybrid office, 30 employees might come in full-time and need an assigned desk. Then 140 employees come in 2–3 times per week and the last 30 visit on a quarterly basis. The same 100 desks can now accommodate 200 employees, for a 2x increase!
But, how do you ensure your office is not booked over capacity? Voilá, we have solved this with automatic capacity management.
Customizable features
To see the automatic capacity management in action, you start by uploading your floor plan, selecting the available desks, and determine the safe capacities for the current time phase. Employees can see available desks and sit near their teammates (or book a quiet desk for heads-down time!). Once the maximum number of reservations have been made, no more bookings will be allowed for that day.
This capacity feature can be particularly useful for companies phasing back into the office after lockdowns. For instance, you can start by allowing a 25% capacity and then gradually increase capacity to 50% then up to 100% — making re-entry feel controlled and manageable for both office managers and employees.
Advantage #2: Team collaboration magic!
With a hybrid remote setup, you get the best of focused remote work while still celebrating and being able to collaborate with teammates. The coordination becomes more difficult when teammates are no longer in the office 5x/week. OfficeTogether helps you with team office scheduling.
From the OfficeTogether calendar, employees can search each other’s in-office schedules and plan accordingly. For me personally, if I know my designer will be in the office on Wednesday and Friday this week, I will adjust my own schedule to ensure we can draw on a whiteboard in person. Sustainable teamwork made easier.
Beyond managing individual schedules, OfficeTogether brings teams together to work. You can reserve multiple seats for a team meeting or external visitors, making in-person collaboration and bonding a breeze to coordinate.
Advantage #3: Safety and Contact Tracing
Finally, your return to office must be safe! We integrate health checks directly into the calendar and make it easy to do lightweight contact tracing. As an admin, you can create a custom health symptom questionnaire, which will be automatically sent to incoming employees’ emails and Slack accounts 24 hours before their office reservations. After taking a simple one-question health check, employees will be free to visit the office, keeping the office healthy and compliant with local laws around symptom-tracking.
In the case of an exposure event, you can use OfficeTogether to quickly pull a list of employees in the office on that day. With one click, you can craft a custom email to the potentially-exposed employees with next steps. No health data is stored in OfficeTogether, so your employees’ privacy is always respected above all.
As you can see, the OfficeTogether team has been hard at work to make sure your return to office is easy, safe and flexible! If you want to empower your employees to use your company’s office space on a flexible or part-time basis, we designed our software for you. Contact me (the founder), amy[at]officetogether.com, for a demo and mention this article for a special promotion.
