Reverse hoteling in the modern workplace

The almost universal norm for white collar, 9 to 5 office workers used to be having a desk of your own, decorated with pictures of your family, your favourite sports team’s colours and filled with your stationery and snacks. This is still a common occurrence in many workplaces around the world, but the norm is increasingly changing, to something far more variable and flexible.

Most people in the UK, even if they still work every day at the same desk, have heard of hot desking, where instead of having an assigned desk, employees take whichever desk is available when they get to the office. Hot desking enables companies to both accommodate people’s desire or need to work away from the office on occasions and save on the cost of unused space and resources.

What is reverse hoteling?

Almost no one in the UK will have heard of hoteling, which is American for hot desking or a hot desking system where you reserve your desk in advance. For some, the length of time a worker is temporarily assigned a workspace determines if it is hot desking or hoteling, not whether you can reserve the space in advance.

Understandably, even fewer people anywhere will have heard of reverse hoteling, which is where a person who typically works at a particular workstation is temporarily not using it, so it is available, like an Airbnb rental, for other people to use. Of course, like an Airbnb rental, for reverse hoteling in an organisation to work, people have to be able to reserve a workstation. And that’s where cutting edge workplace management software, like Matrix Booking, comes in.Set up your desk as a resource on Matrix Booking for a particular time period and when colleagues search for available space to work during that time period, they can see it and book it. You don’t have to do anything after your desk is set up on the system, it can all be done by your colleagues on the Matrix Booking website or mobile app.

Even if your idea of hotelling is being able to reserve a hot desk, both hoteling and hot desking can also take advantage of Matrix Booking. The advantage to everyone is that if the number of workstations in an office is less than the total number of employees who work there, an employee who has the option of working from home or working in the office can see well in advance or just before traveling to the office, whether or not workstations are available at a given time, and avoid a wasted journey.

How Matrix Booking supports hoteling

Reverse hoteling, hoteling and hot desking can all be configured for teams so that groups of workstations can be booked as a unit. Organisations can also promote staff integration and reduce the siloing of departments, like product development and sales, by setting up Matrix Booking to limit the access staff from one department have to a set of workstations that have been interspersed with other workstations that can only be booked by another department. Similarly, any resources (from desks to rooms) that your organisation wishes to rent to another organisation, either in a hoteling or reverse hoteling capacity, can be made available to them via the Matrix Booking app, allowing you to keep track of their use, either for planning or for billing purposes.

Whichever way you approach your workplace management to enable your employees to do their best work, Matrix Booking has you and them covered, with its simple and intuitive app for finding, booking and if necessary cancelling bookings of desks, computers, tablets and meeting rooms. You name it and if it is a resource that your employees share the use of, they can coordinate their sharing of it using Matrix Booking.