When someone books something in advance, there’s always a chance that plans will change and they may not end up needing what they’ve booked. Use desk check-ins and abandoned desk protection to get a clearer picture of who’s using which desks and when.
Watch the tutorial or follow the guide below
Enable abandoned desk protection
Abandoned desk protection can be enabled for an entire building or for specific desk groups for flexible desks only. To enable abandoned desk protection, you must first enable desk check-ins.
Enable for an entire building
Navigate to Manage > Offices > select a building > scroll down to "Desk policies" section> toggle on the Desk check-ins + Abandoned desk protection.
After you've enabled abandoned desk protection, you can adjust the abandoned desk threshold. This is the time to wait before an unconfirmed desk reservation is canceled:
Enable for flex desk groups
From the Office search page > navigate to the Manage drop-down menu on the map > Layout Desks.
Use your cursor to select a group of desks > in the right menu panel click the Policies tab > select + to add a policy > select Desk check-ins > toggle Abandoned desk protection > adjust the threshold (the time to wait before an unconfirmed desk reservation is canceled).
?To give employees a reasonable grace period for checking in, we recommend setting the abandoned desk threshold to four hours.
How it works
When employees reserve a hot/hotel desk that has desk check-ins and abandoned desk protection enabled, they’ll need to check in sometime between the start of the confirmation window and the end of the abandoned desk threshold.
Example: A desk has check-ins and abandoned desk protection enabled, with a one-hour advance confirmation window and a two-hour abandoned desk threshold. If a user books a reservation for tomorrow starting at 9:00 am, they’ll need to check in between 8:00 am (one hour before start) and 11:00 am (two hours after start) in order to keep their seat.
We'll send an email notification if your desk reservation is automatically canceled that will look something like this:
To learn more about the different ways employees can check in to a desk, head this way!
What happens when a desk is released
When a desk reservation is released through abandoned desk protection, the reservation is canceled rather than deleted. The user’s reservation will still appear on the desk export, with the "Canceled at" field indicating when the reservation was released and with the "Cancellation type" field indicating how it was canceled (automatically or manually).