BookingsPlus can do much more than just manage public room lettings. It can be used to manage the hiring of equipment, internal use of your facilities and as this article explains, BookingsPlus is perfect for managing your staff use of your offices desk space.
Using BookingsPlus in this way will help to control the number of people using the office at any one time, ensure staff know what desks are available to use and help manage the cleaning of desks after use. Best of all, you can integrate this use into your existing booking system so whether your venue has 5 or 50 bookable spaces already setup, you can add as many more as you require to accommodate each desk and staff member who will be using this feature. There is no additional cost to your organisation to use BookingsPlus to manage your desk space. All advice in this article will ensure your bookings are setup for 'free'.
Get started by following the 4 simple steps below.
Please note: To setup and configure the features discussed in this article you must have the 'Master Venue Admin' or 'Venue Admin Plus user role.
1. Calendar Categories
Using the calendar categories feature allows you to organise and filter your desks separately to the rest of your bookable spaces. If you have a single office space, you can create a category called 'Office' which you will assign each desk to. If you have multiple rooms or partitions within your office space, you can create as many additional calendar categories as you need.
This step is optional but highly recommended as it will make it quick and easy to find your desks, check who is already using them and assign staff to unused desks all within your calendar view.
2. Create Bookable Spaces to use as desks
This is the most important part of using BookingsPlus to manage your office space as it will enable you to assign individual staff members to each desk. You can create as many bookable spaces for desks you have available within your office.
When creating bookable spaces to use for this purpose there are a few options to consider;
| Space Name | Use a name which makes it easy to identify the desks position within your office. If it is a desk used by a specific colleague, name it accordingly i.e. Julie's Desk. |
| Price | Set each pricing option to £0. This will ensure staff members are not charged for use of a desk. Bookings without a cost are automatically exempt from invoicing. |
| Notes | Notes are useful particularly if you allow 'hot desking' as you can list the equipment available to use at each desk. You may also use notes to offer a more descriptive way of identifying a desks position within the office i.e. Located directly underneath large window. |
| Calendar Categories | Assign your desk to the calendar category you have created for it. This ensures the desk is visible when filtering by category within your calendar. |
| Photographs | Adding at least one photograph of the desk provides a visual way to identify its position within your office. |
| Space Business Hours | By default the business hours option will follow the instructions set at venue level. You can however adjust the times for individual desks which is useful if a particular office space is locked up at a different time to other parts of your building. Staff members will be unable to book a desk outside of the set business hours. |
3. Adding staff members
Use the 
feature within BookingsPlus to create new user accounts for each staff member. This will enable you to assign individuals to each desk, track their usage and provides your staff with a platform to login and manage their own account.
Please note: If your staff members are already setup as administrators or site staff within the platform, please do NOT create new client accounts for them using the same email address they already log into BookingsPlus with. You can either set them up as 'Client' users using an alternative email address or instead create a single 'Staff Member' user. Notes can be used when allocating this user to a desk to identify the staff member using it.
When adding new staff members it is important to select the 'Non-Billable client' option as this will add another layer to ensure the user is exempt from invoicing and not charged to use the desk.
4. Allocating staff members to desks
The final step involves using the booking feature to allocate staff to different desks. Doing this within your calendar view gives you visibility regarding who and how many desks are in use at any one time. If you are limiting your office space to a certain number of staff at any one time or wish to take measures to ensure you don't have people sitting directly next to each other, the calendar view makes doing this straightforward.
The grey colour of each booking shows they are internal use and not subject to invoicing or payment
Watch the video introduction below to see a working example:
Advanced Advice
Enable staff to check availability and book a desk themselves
BookingsPlus provides a 'self-service booking' feature which allows you to select specify client users who can book themselves into a space. There is customisation within this feature, for example; you can lock the functionality to specific spaces meaning you could allow staff members to book themselves onto a desk but limit their ability to book other parts of your premises such as meeting rooms, sports hall or pitches.
To find out whether your booking system currently has access to the self-service booking feature, please contact bookingsplus@kajima.co.uk quoting the name of your venue. Our team will check and provide you with further advice on how to setup and configure self-service bookings in a way which works for your requirements.
Please note: By opting for self-service bookings, you lose the ability to control how many staff members book a desk at any one time and also the desks they book. If limiting the number of staff using a room and ensuring they remain adequately distanced is an important factor for your organisation, you may wish to not use this feature and instead control usage at administrator level.
Give your cleaners access
By also setting up your cleaners as 'Client' users, you can allocate them to desks to be cleaned after a staff member has finished using it. Your cleaners can log into their own account to see when and where they are required to clean. They will also be able to see how many desks are in use at any one time to help ensure your social distancing guidelines are adhered to. (COVID-19 specific issue).
