Desk booking: making hot desking work without daily arguments

Desk booking is the practice of reserving a workspace in advance instead of owning one permanently. It arrives with hybrid working: if half the company is in on Tuesday and a fifth on Friday, permanent desks sit empty most of the week while Tuesday runs out of space. A desk booking system solves the arithmetic, but the friction people complain about is almost never technical — it is the rules around who can book what, how far ahead, and what happens when someone books a desk and does not turn up.

How many desks do you actually need?

Start with attendance data, not with an assumption. Count people on site per day for a few weeks, take the busiest day rather than the average, and add headroom for growth and for teams that coordinate their days. A ratio of around seven desks per ten people suits many hybrid offices, but a company where three teams all come in on Tuesday needs capacity for Tuesday, not for the weekly mean. Under-providing turns the booking system into a lottery and pushes people back to working from home whether or not that was the intention.

Rules that prevent the usual problems

• Booking window: far enough ahead to plan a commute, short enough to stop desks being locked months in advance — a week or two is typical.
• Limit standing bookings, or review them periodically, so hot desks do not quietly become owned desks.
• Automatic release: if nobody checks in within an hour or two, the desk returns to the pool.
• Team zones or neighbourhoods, so people who work together sit together without booking individually.
• Reserved provision for accessibility needs and equipment-dependent roles — those desks should not be in the pool at all.
• A clear-desk expectation at the end of the day, otherwise the next person inherits someone's clutter.

Publish occupancy data to everyone, not just to facilities. When people can see that Wednesday is half empty, some of them move their day voluntarily, which is cheaper than any rule you can enforce.

Running desk booking day to day

1. Map the floor: number every desk, mark equipment, and identify quiet and collaborative areas.
2. Choose how people book — a calendar-based reservation is enough for most offices under a few hundred desks.
3. Publish the rules with the system, including what happens to no-shows.
4. Review utilisation monthly: which desks are never booked, which days are at capacity, which teams cluster.
5. Adjust layout and ratios from that data rather than from complaints, and tell people what changed.

Ettex Calendar covers the booking half for an office of this size: desks as bookable resources, a visible day view so people can see where their team is sitting, and recurring bookings for fixed days. The occupancy figures it produces feed the space management decisions — how much office you need, and which parts of it are earning their rent.