When returning to the office, a lot of companies weren’t sure how to best “schedule” their employees' visit to the office. This is why Excel sheets became the default way of proceeding. Indeed …  Excel sheets incorporated an infinite number of rows with employees’ names, as well as many columns with dates. An “X” at the intersection between some of these rows and columns indicated when someone had to come to the office. Overwhelming to say the least. And extremely hard to maintain. 

Why go through the hassle of manual work with Excel when a desk booking software exists and makes your life much easier?! Here are a couple of reasons why you should consider giving your employees a choice about their visit to the office and why a desk booking app will change your way of working.

Flexible work

The main reason why our customers choose Ciao is that we enable them to remain flexible. To use the office in an agile way, you have to go beyond assigning fixed days and zones to teams in Excel sheets. You need to give employees the possibility to visit the office when they need it most. That is what our desk booking app offers. Employees can choose the time and the day of their visit at the office and even synchronize their visit with other colleagues, so they can collaborate and socialize in a safe environment.

With our web and mobile app, employees are able to quickly see the available spots and book a desk in less than 3 clicks. They can also check who will be in the office and whether someone from their “favorite” list will be present. Working with the colleagues you get along with the most always makes a trip to the office worth it! 

The mobile app also gives employees the opportunity and flexibility to book a spot in the office whenever they want and this whether they’re on the go, at home or at the supermarket. They can decide to go to the office at the last minute just by checking the app on their phone.

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Book a zone for your team

Sometimes you want to make sure that certain types of roles within the company receive priority over others when it comes to booking a desk. For example, sales or customer teams are usually more often in the office because the nature of their job requires it. But how do you make sure these teams have a desk without setting up a fixed assignment of a large number of desks? With Ciao, you give priority to certain teams for booking certain zones, while simultaneously ensuring that any remaining desk that is not booked by that team can be reserved by others.

You can easily indicate which teams have priority for booking desks in a specific area or zone of the office. You can limit their priority to certain days of the week. People belonging to those teams are then the only ones that can book those zones. However, you can also limit their priority to a set time, after which the zones become available for anyone else to book.

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Easily keep track of the occupancy data

A hybrid work model offers opportunities to optimize office space use. Flexible offices don't need to have the same amount of workstations as the number of employees anymore. They just need to be able to provide a workplace only when the employee visits. The workspace usage data provided by Ciao gives insight into the occupancy flow of your office, as well as an indication of how to reduce the desk numbers without hurting employee productivity.

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See who's in the office right now

Some of Ciao’s most used features are the “Who’s in'' and “Reservations” information. Office managers and facility managers monitor the occupancy of the office in real time, for instance, they can see who has a reservation but hasn't checked-in or checked-out already. When using this type of real time data, they become more effective in keeping the office safe and readily available for people coming into the office.

Most of our customers started out with Excel, but switched to Ciao to maintain a flexible and optimized office. If your goal is to implement a hybrid workplace in the long term, a desk booking software like Ciao is essential.

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Integrate your payroll software

Knowing when people are in the office becomes essential for calculating the allowances in the payroll. With Ciao, you can integrate with your HRIS software and push all the work form home or office presence data for calculating your monthly payroll.

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