Desk Booking & Hybrid Workplace

The Workplace Manager v1.0

Runs workplace and facilities for a 900-person insurer with offices in Cologne, Munich and Vienna and 0.6 desks per employee since the move to hybrid work. Tuesdays are full, Fridays are empty, and the Munich lease is up in eighteen months. Wants desks, rooms and parking on real floor plans, no-shows released automatically, neighbourhoods per team, and occupancy figures built from check-ins rather than bookings, good enough to take to the board.

The People Lead v1.0

Head of People at a 250-person software company in Hamburg that asks for two office days a week and gets complaints that nobody else is there on them. Wants everyone to see who is coming in before they commute, team and anchor days, desks next to the colleagues they plan with, all of it inside Microsoft Teams where people already are, and nudges rather than a control system the works council would never sign.

The Microsoft 365 Administrator v1.0

Runs Microsoft 365, Entra ID and Intune for a 1,200-person manufacturer with six sites and forty room mailboxes nobody keeps tidy. Will not create accounts by hand: wants single sign-on and SCIM provisioning from Entra ID, room bookings synced both ways with Exchange, a Teams app and an Outlook add-in deployed centrally, room displays that are not a closed box, an API, audit logs, and a subprocessor list the security team can review.

The Works Council Member v1.0

Sits on the works council of a 2,000-person utility and chairs its IT committee. Under § 87(1) no. 6 BetrVG a desk booking system is a technical device that can monitor employees, so nothing goes live without a works agreement. Wants to know who sees who sat where, how long booking and check-in records are kept, whether reports stay anonymous below a minimum group size, whether presence can be hidden, and where the data is hosted and by whom.

The Office Manager v1.0

Office manager at a 70-person design and marketing agency in Leipzig with 40 desks, three meeting rooms and twelve parking spaces, and does it next to reception, purchasing and onboarding. The parking spreadsheet causes an argument every Monday. Wants a floor plan set up in an afternoon, booking from Slack and the phone, a fair rule for the parking spaces, desks released when someone does not show, and a monthly price read off the website.

The Skeptic v1.0

Has seen "real-time occupancy" that counted bookings and never a person, an auto-release nobody switched on because check-in annoyed the board, and a per-user price that doubled once rooms, parking and SSO were added. Asks how a no-show is detected, what the occupancy figures are built from, which room displays and sensors work without the vendor's own hardware, where the booking history is stored — and how it would leave.