Distance planning & capacity limitations for desks – Robin Help Center

Requirements

Custom roles: Reserve & Assign at the location/building level + delegation permission
Admin or owner role

Experiment with layouts of safely distanced desks and floor capacity restrictions using the configuration tool. Run through the prerequisites & tool tips outlined below before getting started.

This guide assumes that you already:

Submitted floor plans to your Account Manager and the converted Maps have been successfully uploaded to your Robin account.
Created floors in Robin to assign your map to the corresponding floor.
Created desks on the map

Watch the tutorial below or follow the guide

Tips for using the configuration tool

Navigation tips:

To move around the map, simply click and drag
Zoom in to see the desk assignee names.
To switch to another floor in the building, select the Floor button in the top right corner.
Select multiple desks, hold shift + cursor.
To turn on the distance radius bubbles click the "radius icon" in the bottom right corner. Then you can adjust the radius size by hovering over the edge of the green bubble to activate the resizing tool. See the example below. Note, the size does not save between draft sessions.

Keyboard shortcuts menu:

Desk status overview

Available desks	Empty & you can use it.
Unavailable desks	Empty & cannot be booked
Active desks	Visible & actively managed within Robin. End-users may reserve & interact with it.
Archived desks	Archived & not active in any user-facing features. Only admins may reactivate them. Your organization is no longer billed for the desk.

Distance planning

1: On the Office search page select > Edit floor drop down in the map > Configuration.

2: Select the desks you want to turn on or off

To select multiple desks, hold shift + click desks.
To select a group of desks, drag the cursor across the desks.

3: Use the on/off toggle on the right to change the desk status

Common Pitfalls

If folks are currently assigned to desks or have desk reservations, it's important to note that changing a desk to "unavailable" status or "starting a new plan" will unassign the person from that desk or terminate reservations. Don't panic if you weren't ready to cancel desk assignments or reservations-- remember this is only a draft. No changes are official until you publish the draft. However, once it's published we cannot recover or revert back to the original plan.

4: (Optional) Change the desk type

In the right side menu, use the desk type dropdown > select assigned, hotel, or hot. (The desk type can be changed using the Layout tool too.)

⚡Hot tip: Hold the CMD/CTRL button while clicking desks to automatically switch the availability status.

5: Save & publish changes (see notes below) or continue to office capacity settings.

Limit daily office capacity

The floor overview legend on the left helps measure desk availability & office capacity. You can set a daily limit on the number of flex desks that can be booked per floor per day.

This gives employees the flexibility to choose where they want to work from a pool of desks, but once the cap is reached, any remaining desks become unavailable to book.

1: Use the toggle to turn on capacity limits & enter a max # of desks that can be booked. Note, the capacity limitation only applies to hot and hotel desks.

2: Save & publish changes (see notes below)

About draft mode

Whether you're assigning seats for the first time, shuffling folks around, changing desk types, or available/unavailable desks, you're working in draft mode.

But let's say you're not ready to push those changes out for everyone to see?

Exit the draft mode and all the edits will automatically be saved as a draft. Seat assignments and desks operate under the same draft.

If your floor plan is made up of assigned seating then Return to seat assignment mode (top center buttons) to reassign the active desks via drag & drop.

About publish mode

Read before publishing!

Publishing a draft will wipe out all current seat assignments and desk reservations. We do not store original copies of floor plans & seating arrangements. The original arrangement cannot be retrogressed on our end. We recommend triple-checking the new plan before publishing a draft. No changes are official until you publish the draft. Or you can discard the draft and all assignments/reservations will remain the same.

When you're ready to go live with the seat assignments and/or desk management plan, select Review and publish in the top right corner. Or discard the proposed draft changes.

Review the changes outlined in the modal:

The review and publish modal summarizes any changes made to seat assignments & the impact it has on flexible desk reservations. Note: The “Notify people of changes via email” flag notifies users that there's been a change to their seat or desk reservation.

Lastly, the user who is publishing the draft will receive an email receipt that displays the impact on seat assignments & desk reservations. This gives office managers a historic view of the changes and the ability to follow up with users that may need to reserve another seat.