Desk booking and workplace management software lets employees book a desk or a meeting room and sign visitors in, and shows the company how much of its office space is really used. It is also called an integrated workplace management system (IWMS) when it covers the whole office, including its assets and leases. Its buyers are companies that rent or own large offices, especially those with hybrid work, in which employees come to the office on some days and work from home on others.
With hybrid work, a company no longer needs one desk for every employee. But it cannot know how many desks it needs without measuring. Desk booking gives it the measure.
Consider an IT services company with 2,400 employees in a tech park in Coimbatore. It has 1,500 desks on three floors. Each employee is expected in the office three days a week. On Monday evening, an engineer opens the app and books desk 4C-112 for Wednesday. She logs in to the app with her company account, through single sign-on (SSO). On Wednesday, she taps her card at the floor's door. The access control system reports the tap, and the booking is marked as used. If she does not arrive by 10:30 a.m., the desk is released, so that someone else can book it. Meeting rooms work the same way. A room booked for 2 p.m. is released if nobody checks in within ten minutes.
The software also signs in visitors. A client who is visiting gets an email invitation with a QR code. At the reception, the client scans the code and shows a photo ID. A temporary card is printed, and the host is told that the guest has arrived. A simpler version of this, at the gate of a housing society, is described in visitor management systems.
Every booking, check-in and card tap adds to a report on how the space is used. After three months, the company's report shows that 85% of desks are used from Tuesday to Thursday, but only 35% on Mondays and Fridays. The company asks teams to share desks on fixed days. It then gives up one floor of 25,000 square feet. At ₹70 per square foot per month, it saves ₹17.5 lakh a month in rent.
If a chair is broken or a screen does not work, an employee reports it from the same app. The report opens a repair job in the computerised maintenance management system (CMMS).
How is this different from coworking space booking? Coworking booking is used by people who rent desks by the day or month from a coworking company. Workplace management is used by a company for its own office.