After several years of pandemic precautions, we can no longer deny that working from home is a viable workplace strategy.  With 60% of workers still working from home with the blessing of their company, the workplace is being reimagined and many organizations have chosen to adopt hybrid work.  And one way you can meet the needs of your roaming workforce is to use hot desking (also known as hoteling).

Hot desking is a flexible workplace strategy that lets workers choose which desk they work at on a given day based on their preferences and availability. Using this method, an employee “books” a workstation so that they can then set up a laptop or sign into a provided desktop computer as well as log in to their assigned extension.  This method of working has been around for decades, but in recent years, hot desking has become increasingly popular among businesses looking to save money and improve employee satisfaction.

Benefits of Hot Desking

According to an Accenture report, 83% of employees prefer a hybrid work option, and 63% of high-revenue growth businesses have adopted the strategy.  On the flip side, 69% of negative or no growth organizations have rejected the idea of a flexible work strategy.  The benefits of hot desking seem to speak for themselves – and here are four of those benefits that businesses are realizing as they adopt the strategy:

Enhances collaboration – Let’s say you decide to hold an interdepartmental collaboration session.  How would you organize that now?  Call everyone into a central conference room where there may or may not be enough space for everyone to sit and access their computers.  Not only is this potentially disruptive to your meeting and your employee’s ability to get their other tasks done but can frustrate and annoy your workers resulting in reduced job satisfaction.  But with hot desking, especially in an open office concept, departments could simply find an open workstation and toss ideas back and forth while maintaining their normal productivity and duties.

Reduces costs – The idea behind hot desking is that some days a worker will come into an office and some days they won’t.  As a result, not every employee needs an assigned desk.  Organizations can reduce the size of their physical office footprint and pay less in rent and utilities and maintenance.

Aids Hybrid Work Strategies – for a hybrid work strategy to be successful, you need processes in place that enable your employees to work from both in office and outside of the office.  Hot desking, along with a process to “book” a workstation for days your employee will need to be in the office, is one of the key ways you can make this happen.

Improves Employee Satisfaction – as we shared above, 83% of employees prefer a hybrid work option where they have the ability to choose where they perform their daily tasks.  Other statistics reported by Zippia found that those organizations that adopted a hybrid work strategy also found a 12% reduction in employee turnover and saved up to $11,000 per year.

 

 

How to Implement Hot Desking

Hot desking (or hoteling) is a function of your communications system.  To enable hot desking you will have to set up your internal PBX in a way that enables employees to “log in” and “log out” of their extension.  The process includes an employee entering sign in credentials to the phone on the desk and then that phone becomes “hot” and tied to their extension, so when a call is received or made from that phone it is registering as the employee’s individual extension.  Depending on your system, this process can be simple (a few clicks on a web-based user interface) or complicated requiring the expertise of a certified installer.

(Side note: With MIX Networks hosted solutions the process is as simple as clicking a few buttons.)

One thing that is clear is that hybrid work is here to stay.  The only question is how you will accomplish it within the unique setting of your organization.  Find out how.

Keep Reading:

Essential Tools for a Hybrid Workforce

Hybrid Work: How to Make Your Business More Productive with Technology

45 Stats on Video Calling That Will Bring Us Closer