Subscribe
Sign in
Robin
p/robinYour workplace is ready to go again
Start new thread
Ben Lang

Robin Desks - Hot-desking and seat assignments made easy

by
Top Product
•

Sit wherever you want with the new Robin Desks: a desk booking and seat management tool for your workplace. Decide which desks are up for a quick stay or a weeklong stint. Switch up a team’s seats and share updates in a few clicks. Desks works with whatever workflow your office embraces.

Add a comment

Replies

Best
Zach Dunn
Maker
Good morning everyone! Activity based work is an evolution of today’s (embattled) “open office”. Most offices have two modes of working, either you’re at your Official Desk ™ or in a meeting. Activity based work embraces the fact that sometimes the best place to clear your inbox is different than the place you brainstorm with your team. The office should encourage people to move around based on their goals. As we’ve learned from our room scheduling customers over the years, finding the right tools to help support this new way of working is hard. We made Desks to help make these styles of work more approachable. Flexible arrangements like hot desking (same day, for the day) and hoteling (short term, “for the week”) help by opening up more of the office to more of the team. Done well, flexible seating helps teams get more done by making sure they always have the best place to work for the day -- and shuffle when it changes. Unless you’ve managed to hang onto a CRT monitor, moving around the office is easier than ever. The “one desk per person” sounds reasonable on paper, but leads to rigid structures where companies surrender large parts of their office to empty desks as their sales team travels, or marketing spends the day in meetings. That’s how organizations end up with ~40% empty desks on average day. Desks is built to support both short and long term desk assignments, which makes it easier to introduce to an office. When you update seats, that change is immediately visible to everyone else, so you no longer have to worry about updating that (really great!) spreadsheet or internal wiki to avoid ending up on a milk carton. We’re excited to get feedback on this one, since it’s the first major expansion to our office platform since introducing conference room scheduling a few years ago. Let us know what you think!
Ben Lang
Top Product
Hunter
@zachdunn Congrats on the launch! This is awesome.
Ryan Hoover
I'm curious who this product is designed for. I wish it was implemented at Philz so I could guarantee myself a seat, but I don't think that's the target demo. 😂
Zach Dunn
Maker
@rrhoover If we can capture even 1% of the sitting population this will be huge. This is built for the types of office where you have a hard time naming everyone off the top of your head. Over the past couple years we've been fortunate to meet many of the customers we have in conference room scheduling. Many were in the process of building new offices or redesigning their current digs to add more collaborative space. Laptops make it easy to move, but it's hard to put the office to use when you feel anchored to a specific seat. The facilities team generally controls seating arrangements, but have no way of knowing if it's working well beyond "are we full yet?". By no fault of their own, they end up spending $$$ supporting a rigid system when they could safely remove 1 in 4 desks w/ a flexible seating arrangement. We think there's better ways to spend that budget -- now we can give them the backup to make the upgrades.
Jacqueline von Tesmar
Hey @alyissa_dzaugis, @sdunn, @zachdunn and @briancmuse, So the idea is to give remote workers an office when they need one, or is this just for employees within their own office? What was your inspiration for creating this app?
Zach Dunn
Maker
@jacqvon Thanks for kicking this off! Everything we build helps people coordinate the people, places, and things around their office. Most of our users will show up to a physical workplace for the same company regularly. There are a few folks out there that do the on-demand desk rental incredibly well already, and that's something we'll leave to the pros. On inspiration, we've spent most of the last few years in the conference room -- literally and metaphorically. While building that product we regularly had folks ask "Can you also help us coordinate the other stuff in our office too?" Desks came up repeatedly, and nobody seemed to have a decent solution. The few options out there treated employees more like inventory which made their buy-in (absolutely required for hot desks) tricky. We spent the last 6 months building this. We believe it helps make flexible seating more approachable to the offices that need it the most.
Nick Francioso
I wish workplaces would adopt something like this, I always seem to get crammed near the restrooms 🤮
Zach Dunn
Maker
@skillsyncer I'm going to have to go ahead and ask you to move your desk... again