The current health and safety situation has facilitated many changes in workplaces around the world. Organizations that once hesitated to hire remote employees are now embracing the idea. Most employees are now working from home at least a few times per week. And it seems this trend will continue for quite a while.
Such employee “rotations” are necessary to uphold health regulations and take care of your employees’ safety during the pandemic. There has to be a certain safety distance between workspaces and this means not all employees can work in the office at the same time.
Scheduling when certain employees can come to the office and choosing the desks they can work at to be far enough from others can be a pain. Not scheduling can be a health hazard. That’s why now is the best time to consider a desk booking system if you don’t already have one in place.
We’ll take a closer look at the Condeco desk booking software, which has been one of the leading desk booking systems available for some time now. But it has its problems, so we’ll also introduce an alternative solution offered by Joan.
Condeco
With Condeco, desks can be booked from an app, browser, configured kiosks, or even Condeco desk displays. Booking is quick and simple with desks categorized by location and availability. Furthermore, bookings are made via an interactive floor plan. Workspaces can be filtered by their attributes: Do they have a monitor? Docking station? Are they wheelchair accessible?
Unfortunately, Condeco’s user interface (UI) has been described as outdated and even cumbersome.
What’s more, the company keeps its pricing under wraps. The best clue to how much Condeco costs are customer reviews reporting that the price is expensive compared to other solutions.
Pros
- Easy setup
- Desk criteria filters
- Analytics to monitor office attendance
- Desks are released if the user doesn’t check in
Cons
- Hidden pricing
- Not-so-easy to use
- Dated UI
Joan Desk Booking App
In 2020, Joan released a handy desk booking app of their own created specifically for these tough times. The app is simple and requires no employee training to use, enabling users to book a desk from their desktop or mobile device.
Claiming a desk is as easy as panning across a floor plan and tapping a desk to book it, making the app “perfect for all generations and levels of technical skill sets.”
One area where the Joan Desk Booking app shines is its ability to restrict office capacity and block off desks to enforce social distancing protocols.
That way office managers can ensure health and safety protocols are enforced automatically. If there would be too many employees in the office at the same time, you can’t book a desk. If your preferred desk would be too close to another employee, you can’t book it either. Not to mention, the app’s new bundle with free employee health check feature.
Another really handy feature is Joan Desk Booking app’s integration with Microsoft Active Directory. That simplifies the user management process for Joan’s admin by automatically keeping the user list up to date, syncing the list on all levels, and automatically assigning users to the correct permission groups.
Joan’s Desk Booking solution’s biggest fault is that many of the app’s greatest features are in development. The company is working to add health questionnaires, visitors check-in and more great features.
You can try out Joan Desk Booking App for free for 30 days and see if it fits your needs.
“The Joan Desk Booking solution was chosen due to the clean and simple way the solution is designed.” – Brett Ey, People & Culture Business Partner at KFC South Pacific
Pros
- Easy setup
- Easy to use
- Free 30-day trial
- Team scheduling options
- Analytics to monitor office attendance
- Cloud-based design
- Fresh UI
- Employee health check feature
- Transparent pricing
Cons
- New features in development
Choosing your desk booking system
The list of cons for Joan is short and sweet simply because the app is still growing. While Joan rolls out new features in the coming months, we will see what users have to say! For now, however, Joan customers are loving the easy-to-use app.
As for Condeco, the company is improving and building new features on top of old foundations. As parts of the app get updated, others stay outdated.
As we enter a new, post-COVID era, we all need a clean slate. We’d dare to say that new apps developed specifically for the current situation will offer solutions many old staples don’t. But we know action speaks louder than words and we invite you to test Joan Desk Booking App for free for 30 days.