Modern workplaces are often designed to foster collaboration. For many hybrid workers, face-to-face interaction with colleagues is the whole point of coming into the office. As a result, office neighborhoods have become a staple of many office layouts.
These group workspaces can come in a variety of forms, from clusters of desks and tables to informal seating like couches and lounge chairs. Some organizations assign neighborhoods to teams or departments, while others let anyone reserve them as needed. Whatever they look like and however they’re used, the point of office neighborhoods is to create a space where it’s easy to alternate between independent work and collaborative processes, facilitating team building, mentorship, and productive workplace interactions.
But it doesn’t always work that way. Getting the full value from office neighborhoods requires employers to do more than simply make them available. How you implement them can create issues you may or may not be aware of—issues that can only be solved with the right infrastructure and processes.
In this article, we’ll examine five of the most common challenges with office neighborhoods, as well as specific ways you can address them.
1. Tracking how office neighborhoods are being used
Office neighborhoods offer a designated place for groups to work. But how do you know if groups are actually using them? Or if they’re using them enough to justify having the neighborhood in the first place? Are your neighborhoods usually at capacity, or do they sit empty most of the day? Are your policies for using office neighborhoods being followed? Is the space serving its intended purpose?
Your desk booking software can show you when a neighborhood is reserved, but you may not get much (or any) visibility into how many people are there or how long they actually use the space. Neighborhoods intended for several people might be occupied by pairs or even individuals who just wanted a quiet space, making them unusable to larger groups.
If an office neighborhood is permanently assigned to a department or team, you lose even the limited visibility provided by reservation data, leaving you with no idea how it’s being used or if you even need it.
The solution: Space utilization sensors and network-based occupancy monitoring solutions offer the granular data employers need to see how many people use each office neighborhood and how long the neighborhood is occupied throughout the day, whether it’s reservable or permanently assigned. This data enables you to understand how your neighborhoods are being used, so you can manage them—and your finite office space—more effectively.
2. Balancing office neighborhood supply and demand
In any workplace, demand for office neighborhoods changes throughout the day, week, or quarter, making it difficult to ensure employees consistently have access to the resources they need to be productive. When demand outpaces office neighborhood supply, it can inhibit operations and force some groups of employees to work in less-ideal circumstances.
Low demand is a problem, too. Allocate too much space for office neighborhoods, and some of these areas will sit vacant while employees lack amenities, private workspaces, and other types of space they want.
And you won’t always know there’s an issue. Some employees may complain, but others will either delay work until the space they need is available or find an alternative space that’s not as suited to their needs.
The solution: Track how your neighborhoods are being used, and you don’t have to rely on complaints and employee feedback to recognize when there’s an imbalance between your supply of neighborhoods and demand for them. You can see whether their average and peak occupancy levels are too high or low.
If high demand is isolated to particular neighborhoods or days of the week, you can proactively communicate the availability of less popular neighborhoods or share the days and times that your highest demand neighborhoods are free to reserve. This helps you redistribute demand without adjusting your supply.
Alternatively, occupancy tracking may reveal other types of space that your office doesn’t use as often. If neighborhoods are almost always in use, other low-demand spaces could be reconfigured into additional neighborhoods, ensuring that groups have better access to collaborative workspace.
3. Creating distractions for other workers
Groups of people working together are louder and more disruptive than people working independently. Office neighborhoods can amplify this issue when they’re placed in central locations and “open” environments, or when you attempt to facilitate group work and independent work in the same space.
In offices with assigned workstations, people working independently may feel they have little recourse when a noisy group schedules time in a nearby neighborhood. It’s not always comfortable asking people to work more quietly, especially when the group is using the space for its intended purpose. And there aren’t always good options to temporarily work somewhere else or block out sound.
The solution: Address the disruption through a combination of policy and space planning. Establish expectations for noise levels and a clear, straightforward process for dealing with especially noisy groups, such as having a designated person who oversees the neighborhood’s use or acts as an intermediary between the group and people who work nearby.
Ideally, neighborhoods should have more separation from other workspaces. You may also want to locate them near spaces where people generally expect there to be more noise, such as amenities or informal group spaces. If that’s not feasible, you can equip neighborhoods and the surrounding workspaces with soundproofing, whether that involves permanent fixtures or configurable furniture such as partitions. This empowers employees with greater control over their work environment, whether they’re working in a neighborhood or next to one.
4. Preventing “no show cancellations”
Any time shared workplace resources are reservable, you run the risk that people will reserve but not use them. Sometimes people may make a reservation “just in case” they need the space or equipment. And other times conflicts arise that prevent them from needing the space after all. Someone couldn’t make it at the original time, so everyone made a new reservation.
Whatever the case, when people don’t show up for their scheduled reservation at an office neighborhood, the space still appears to be unavailable to everyone else in your reservation system. Whether “no show cancellations” affect your workplace once in a while or all the time, they make your neighborhood occupancy levels appear to be higher than they actually are, and make it more difficult for other groups to access the space they need to work together effectively.
The solution: Not all desk booking software supports it, but if your system has check-in capabilities, you can require people to physically acknowledge their presence at the space they’ve reserved within a designated timeframe. If people don’t check-in within the grace period you’ve established, the space becomes reservable again, so someone else can use it. This helps ensure your office neighborhoods are used as intended, and that employees can access every available resource in your workplace.
5. Coordinating reservation schedules
Depending on your hybrid work strategy, the individual members of a team or group will have varying degrees of control over when and where they work from the office. They may all have the same fixed schedules or only a small window of overlap to get together. As teams and groups look to use office neighborhoods, they often have to plan asynchronously, communicating back and forth about the available spaces and their preferred times. And if it’s a hassle to coordinate logistics, this stifles opportunities for collaboration.
The solution: Advanced desk booking solutions like Tango Reserve enable employees to share their reservation schedules with trusted colleagues. When those colleagues plan their own reservations, Tango recommends times and spaces that put them next to these preferred coworkers. Groups can easily and regularly plan time together without the hassle of continually messaging each other and tracking conversations on other channels.
Optimize your office neighborhoods with Tango Workplace
Office neighborhoods play an important role in the modern office. But if you implement them poorly, or don’t have the infrastructure in place to fully utilize them, they can become a waste of space.
The Tango Workplace suite offers organizations a specialized set of tools to maximize the value of their office space—including neighborhoods:
- Tango Occupancy leverages your existing network infrastructure to collect granular occupancy data, enabling you to see how many people use your neighborhoods, and for how long.
- Tango Reserve gives you total control over the reservation process (including the optional check-in process) and lets employees easily reserve workspaces next to colleagues.
- Tango Space establishes a single source of truth for your space utilization data, plus all the capabilities you need to plan scenarios and manage your space—so you can test possibilities like adding more neighborhoods or removing ones that are underutilized.
Want to see what Tango Workplace can do for you?
Request a demo today.
