Desk Booking has been the hot item in “PropTech” for over a year now. Sure, most of the systems pretend to be something like the “OS of the Workplace,” but that’s just fancy sales window dressing. The reality is that any time a company begins contemplating having fewer desks in their office than people assigned, the fear of not having enough space takes over and they tell their vendor partners how they need a desk booking tool to somehow manage it for them. This then creates an artificial sense of demand which the “PropTech” companies respond to with investment and development.
The reality of desk booking is universally disappointing because none of them can deal with the three common and unavoidable scenarios that are associated with every instance of use:
- Employees that book a desk but do not show up;
- Employees that show up without booking a desk; and
- Employees that book a desk but then sit at a different desk.
There are more issues than these, but these are the big three that the systems cannot handle. Every time I have asked desk booking vendors how their solution deals with these problems (double-digit companies in the last 6 months), they respond that there need to be on-site operations procedures to resolve issues. In my world, this means: “Pay someone to sit on-site and babysit employees that cannot be trusted to use our system in the very narrow way we built it to work in addition to paying us for our “solution.”
In my experience, employees can safely be trusted to make their way to a site and figure out how to work without a system telling them what to do. If having no system in place at all works as well or better than having a system, why have a system? I have been part of reservationless agile workplaces for the last 7 years (most of them pre-pandemic) with sharing ratios as high as 4 to 1 in professional services offices. In every case, they were afraid of not having enough space before we went live and asked for a desk booking system. In every case, they were very happy to have no system to manage desks very shortly after going live and experiencing their office without it.
Desk booking is a system built on creating friction. Its job is to stand between an employee and their ability to come to the office and work. Good ones minimize this friction by being fast and easy to use with short, intuitive UIs. Bad ones make the process of picking and reserving a seat a chore that quickly falls away exacerbating the situation of “bad” behavior with desks. The supposed value of this friction is to provide certainty to employees that when they show up at their office, they will have space that they have selected to work from. However, “good” desks are a commodity and this creates artificial reservation behavior for preferred desks on busy days driving up demand for space where that demand may not actually exist.
Technology can do a lot of good for workplaces when done right. Unfortunately, I have yet to see a desk booking tool that works as intended even a majority of the time at all global locations.
PS: There is one use case for desk booking that I have come across that makes sense. For space that is shared (flex or coworking) with a known oversubscription risk on peak days and the reservation has an actual allocation of cost against it, the behavior can actually be managed. You will often see bad behavior on non-peak days, and there will still be some artificial overbooking on peak days, but booking in this scenario often works as it involves 3rd parties.