Office neighborhood examples can give you the information you need to manage neighborhoods in your own workspace through the use of office neighborhood software.
Meeting the demands of hybrid work and agile working head on, office neighborhood software can make the transition to flexible work much easier for employees. But with endless options for customizing office neighborhoods in your workspace and on your floor plan, it can be hard to know where to start.
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In this guide, we’ll outline the types of neighborhoods at your disposal. We’ll also show you how other companies are leveraging neighborhood and neighborhood software in their work environments. Finally, we’ll give you some tips for managing office neighborhoods effectively in the workplace.
Although there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy for creating an office neighborhood workspace, starting with a base template or neighborhood “type” can help you determine the best way to create neighborhoods for each of your teams.
Some of the most common types of office neighborhoods include:
Here’s a deeper explanation of each of these neighborhood types, how they related to specific work settings and work styles, and some tips on when to use them in the workplace.
Groups of seating that only a specific team can use are known as team-specific neighborhoods (e.g. the “Marketing Team Neighborhood” and a “Sales Team Neighborhood” could be added to your floor plan).
Team-specific neighborhoods are a great solution when:
Activity-based neighborhoods help you create clusters of desks on your floor plan that support a particular activity or if you have a team that needs a specific setup to do their work. It’s essential that employee needs are met as related to office layout, open space, meeting spaces, hot desking, and more. For example, a “Design Neighborhood” could support a design team workspace that needs access to sewing machines and cutting tables.
Activity-based neighborhoods are a great solution for your working environments when:
Anyone can sit down and use a seat in open neighborhoods—no booking required. You can make open neighborhoods available to everyone in the workplace, or set accessibility restrictions so that each open neighborhood is exclusively available to a select group of employees (e.g. the HR team; employees visiting from another building).
Open seating neighborhoods are a great solution when:
Because open seating neighborhoods use non-bookable seating, you can use Distancing Planner to make sure all seating is appropriately distanced. And tools like workplace sensors and badge integration can help you track usage until COVID-19 guidelines are relaxed in your region.
Here are some examples of office neighborhoods being used in leading companies:
Office neighborhoods are fully customizable, whether for a large corporation or small business. So if tiki huts and speakeasy-inspired rooms sound a little outside your company culture, don’t stress. You can build whatever space that provides your employees with a sense of belonging and positive workplace experience.
You can set up tailored seating configurations that embody what works best for your company, your real estate portfolio, and your employees. This is far more efficient than running with whatever’s trendy in the world of workplace management right now.
Without the right workplace management technology on hand, it won’t be easy for your workplace design teams and employees to deal with neighborhoods in the workplace. In other words: trying to manage office neighborhoods with an Excel spreadsheet is a terrible idea. Office neighborhood software is essential.
Here’s an overview of the flexible working office neighborhood software you’ll need to manage, monitor, and optimize neighborhoods and leverage the benefits of office neighborhoods in your organization.
With desk booking software, you can create a neighborhood with any combination of flexible seat—hot desk, hoteling, by request, assigned-bookable, free addressing—to give every team the exact setup they need whether they need a quiet or collaborative workspace.
For example, let’s say you’re organizing seating for your marketing and design team. Some of the team members need specific tech setups at their desks. Others want to be in the office full-time. And the rest are hybrid workers who split their week between the office and home.
To support this team, you could create a neighborhood with:
With employees checking into desk bookings each time they use the office, you’ll always know who’s using every desk.
And because employees can book neighborhood desks in advance, they won’t arrive at the office only to find that they don’t have a seat for the day.
With OfficeSpace, you can turn any neighborhood into a team-managed neighborhood. Meaning: a designated seating captain is in charge of managing occupancy, seat assignments, moves, and booking requests.
By putting a team in charge of managing their own seating needs, they’re better placed to decide who should sit where. This can also impact the sense of community in the team.
Facilities can step in to support a team-managed neighborhood whenever a seating captain needs help. But they aren’t burdened with the task of overseeing every booking request or seating change. Bottom line, this a huge win for workplace teams that are going to be stretched to their limit during the return to work.
Team-managed seating is exclusive to OfficeSpace. Book a demo to see this feature in action.
To manage flexible work efficiently (i.e. plenty of freedom for employees with zero day-to-day upkeep for facilities teams), companies need more control over who can use each desk.
Desk permissions in OfficeSpace allow you to restrict desk usage based on a variety of filters. Including team, department, job title, and more.
These advanced permissions benefit workplace teams and individual employees:
If managing desk permissions sounds daunting to you, that’s probably because you’re familiar with the old-school method of managing desk permissions.
In the past, permissions had to be set manually for every single desk. So any time employees joined the company, exited the company, or simply switched teams, your already-busy facilities team had to go in and update the desk permissions for those employees.
We solved that problem in OfficeSpace by linking desk permissions to your employee record system. Now, whenever an employee’s record changes, all of the desks that employee can use are updated on your floor plan automatically.
Here are two quick examples that highlight how convenient this feature really is:
Once your neighborhoods are set up, you’ll need to monitor neighborhood desk usage and optimize your neighborhood setups over time. Again: it’s yet another task that you can’t do with Excel or PowerPoint.
With neighborhood reports inside OfficeSpace, you can set and track allocation, sharing ratios, and capacity targets for each neighborhood.
With these insights on hand, workplace teams can:
Get a personalized demo and create a hybrid workplace that works for everyone
OfficeSpace is the only workplace management platform that gives you everything you need to create a better place for everyone. Including the world’s most advanced office neighborhood software features and powerful flexible working neighborhood software.
If you’d like to see how OfficeSpace can help you leverage neighborhoods in the post-pandemic workplace and beyond—and also create the perfect setup for every team—book a demo with our team.
Photos: Sarah Pflug, olia danilevich, Proxyclick Visitor Management System, Canva Studio