Tips For Managing Your Open Office Plan
If you have a business with an office, there is a good chance that you have an open office plan. Open office plans make it easier for your employees to communicate and collaborate with one another. They also tend to be cheaper. However, it can be difficult for employees to find desks to work at due to the fact that the desk arrangement changes each day and that there is no assigned seating. Here are some tips for making sure that you manage the desk space in your open office plan as efficiently as possible so that employees can spend their time doing work rather than looking for a seat.
1. Create Zones
Your first step is to create zones on each floor of your office to ensure that people are easily able to describe where they are so that other employees can find them. This is important because it will reduce the amount of time that employees spend looking for one another and can help encourage people who work on the same team to collaborate in the same area. Consider making the boundary between the zones physical or at least visible in order to make sure that people can easily tell the zones apart.
2. Use Desk Management Software
Next, assign desks and other furniture to each zone in order to make sure that no single zone gets too crowded or has way fewer desks than any other zone. Once you have done this, you can use desk management software to your advantage.
If you want to keep it simple, you can simply count the number of desks that you have in each zone and then have each person that uses a desk in the zone "check one out" by claiming it using the software. When they are done with it or when they leave the zone, they can "return it" through the software so that another person knows that he or she can use it.
If you want to micromanage a little bit more closely, you can label each individual desk clearly and keep it in a static location. This will allow employees who need to work in a group to use the software to find a clump of desks that are all next to each other and free. They can then check them out for the day and ensure that they are able to work with the coworkers that will be able to help them the most.
For more information, talk to a company that specializes in open office plan desk management like Add-On.