The Blog on Meeting Room Management

Hot desking has become a popular practice for growing companies as a way to save money, improve efficiency, and create a more agile work environment for their employees. Office space can be pricey, and in more traditional office models space is often under-utilized. Hot desking capitalizes on the growing agility in today’s workplace to help save companies money by moving away from the 1-to-1 seating model in the office. Rather than have assigned desks, employees operate out of an open workspace where they can reserve a desk for the day on-the-spot.

When it first came on the market, the standing desk was supposed to revolutionize the health and productivity of office-based employee, yet many years into the trend the jury is still out on the actual extent of these health benefits. And while standing desks are already prevalent in startups, incubators, and shared workspaces, they have taken longer to trickle down into the more traditional office setting. As more and more corporate offices are updating their equipment, technology, and design to keep up employees happy and engaged, standing desks are starting to become more and more common. So what’s the verdict on the standing desk phenomenon, and are they worth the investment?

As we all know too well, stress doesn’t just disappear when you leave the office for the day. Like email notifications on your phone, stress follows you home each day, affecting your personal relationships, as well as your mental and physical health. When left unacknowledged, stress can cause a bevy of health problems, including anxiety, depression, insomnia, high blood pressure, hypertension, and even increase the likelihood of heart disease. While you can’t eradicate stress from your life or change your immediate circumstances at work, there are still things you can do to help alleviate the stress for both you and your employees.

The definition of workplace security has expanded greatly in today’s digital age. Companies must not only consider employee, customer, and financial safety from external forces – fires, natural disasters, chemical spills and contamination, civil disturbances, terrorism – but also from internal forces – workplace violence, employee theft, intellectual property theft, and data theft.

There are many security risks that could happen within the walls of your office and systems. Your priority must be to provide a safe and secure work environment for your employees and visitors. By law, that means your company must provide an environment free of health and safety hazards, as well as psychological hazards.

You’ve probably heard the statistic: about 40% of the current workforce is already made up of freelancers, solopreneurs, or so-called “contingent” workers, and that number is growing. While it’s true that advances in technology and changes in the makeup of today’s workforce have led to new ideas about where and how work gets done, the modern office is far from dead.

It’s no secret that the office landscape has changed dramatically in recent years. Demographics of the workforce are changing, with more women and minorities currently advancing professionally than ever before, and more generations than ever are sharing the workplace as well. Meanwhile, rapidly advancing technology has shifted cultural attitudes about work and office design, as well as the expectations and priorities of both companies and their employees.

Most of us are already familiar with a hierarchical, or centralized organizational structure. From the government and military to large corporations, a centralized management system has long been the norm. However, more and more organizations of every size are starting to value more egalitarian organizational landscapes. As technology increases agility in day-to-day business operations, decisions need to be made with equal agility, and many are finding that it has become necessary to adapt.

Today, culture is so enmeshed with a company brand that it’s hard to discuss one without the other. It is what you stand for as a company leader and an organization as a whole. Beyond benefits and vacation time, company culture is an environment of support, transparency, and enthusiasm. And it cascades from the top. It’s a huge part of your role to set the tone for how employees feel, how they treat each other, and how they perform.

Move over, Baby Boomers, the next generation of the workforce is here. And they’re demanding change.

As of 2017, Millennials—those born between 1981 and 1996—make up the largest generation in the workforce. They’re bringing with them new talents, capabilities, and work ethics. They’re also bringing a number of expectations about the type of companies they want to work for, the offices they want to spend their time, and the style of working they want to execute.

Meetings: the necessary evil of every business. We need them, they’re not going anywhere, yet office employees site them as the number one waste of time throughout their week and biggest hindrance to productivity. Eliminating the many tedious tasks associated with every meeting—such as finding and booking rooms, reserving technology, ordering catering, and dealing with guests—is a first and tremendously important step in saving time, boosting productivity, and improving employee morale when it comes to meetings.