Managing workplace reservations for employees
Summarize
Summary of Managing workplace reservations for employees
The Managing Workplace Reservations feature in Workplace Core enables workplace managers to reserve office areas and spaces for employees, helping ensure physical distancing and workplace safety. Managers can create, review, and adjust reservations based on area capacity and employee shifts, while employees are notified about their reserved locations.
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Key Features
- Area Reservations: Managers can reserve specific areas on office floors for employees. Reservations respect the area's defined capacity to maintain safety guidelines; areas with zero or undefined capacity cannot be reserved.
- Single and Bulk Space Reservations: Reservations can be created for individual employees for single or multiple days using predefined shifts. Bulk reservations allow assigning multiple employees on the same shift for a date range, facilitating efficient management for departments or teams.
- Child Reservation Records: Each parent reservation generates individual child reservations for every applicable working day based on the selected shift schedule. Conflicts with existing reservations prevent creation of a child reservation for that day, allowing managers to manually allocate alternative workplaces.
- Pending Reservation Requests: After employee requests are approved, the system checks space availability. If unavailable for certain days, requests move to a pending state. Managers can review and reassign these requests to available workplaces to finalize reservations.
Practical Usage for ServiceNow Customers
- Capacity Management: Define area capacities in Workplace Core to control reservation limits and maintain compliance with physical distancing policies.
- Shift-Based Scheduling: Leverage shifts and shift schedules to streamline reservation creation, ensuring employees have assigned workspaces aligned with their working days.
- Efficient Bulk Reservations: Save time by generating reservations for groups of employees sharing the same shift, ideal for managing department-level workspace allocation.
- Reservation Conflict Handling: Understand how the system handles conflicts by skipping conflicting child reservations and enabling manual reassignment, ensuring no double-bookings occur.
- Request Review and Management: Proactively manage pending employee reservation requests by reallocating available spaces, ensuring all approved requests are fulfilled effectively.
Reserve available areas or spaces for your employees and review pending reservation requests from employees in Workplace Core so you can ensure physical distancing measures when they return to the workplace. Once you make reservations, employees are notified about the locations to which they have access. The Workplace Service Delivery also offers more advanced workplace reservation options in the Workplace Reservation Management application.
Creating workplace reservations for employees
- Reserving workplace areas
As a workplace manager, you can make reservations for employees for areas on the floors of your office buildings. When employees return to the office, they can work from any of the spaces from the reserved area. The number of employee reservations that you can make for an area of your workplace depend on the capacity defined for that area. If the Capacity field of an area is set to 0 or left empty, reservations cannot be made for that area.
- Creating a single space reservation
- Using the shifts that you defined, you can create a space reservation for an employee for a single day or multiple days.
- Creating space reservations in bulk
You can generate in one action reservations for multiple employees who are assigned to a shift for a specific date range. For example, you can use this feature to create reservations for employees of a specific department who would all be assigned to the same shift.
- Child reservation records for employee space reservations
When you reserve a workplace for an employee, the reservation generates child reservation records for every applicable working day of the specified period. The applicable days are determined by the shift schedule that you select for this reservation. The reservation that you initially created acts as the parent reservation record.
If a child reservation conflicts with an existing reservation for any day in the specified period, the child reservation is not created for that day. You can manually create a reservation for a different workplace for that day.
For example, say you created a reservation for the workplace 2CN1612 for Mark Andrews in the afternoon shift from 06-01-2020 to 06-10-2020. Eight child reservation records for Mark Andrews for the workplace 2CN1612 would be created for each working day between 06-01-2020 and 06-10-2020. However, if a reservation for 2CN1612 on 06-08-2020 exists for another employee Jane Doe, the child reservation for Mark Andrews on 06-08-2020 is not created. You can manually create a reservation for Mark Andrews for a different workplace for 06-08-2020.
If you update the details of a parent reservation later, all its child reservations except the ones with dates in the past are updated accordingly.
Working with space reservation requests from employees
After an employee requests a workplace for a given date range and the manager approves the request, the application checks the availability of the requested space. If the workplace is unavailable for any or all days of the specified period, the request moves to the Pending state. As a workplace manager, you can review these pending reservation requests and allocate a different workplace to the employee to complete the request.