Office booking : the challenges facing large companies!

In large companies, offices are often divided up by sector or department. Without a booking system, this organisation quickly becomes unmanageable: some sectors find themselves cramped, others with empty offices, and teams struggle to work together effectively.

This lack of structure is more than just a source of discomfort: it leads to wasted time, friction between teams and compromised productivity.

Against this backdrop, office booking is an essential solution for rationalising space and improving organisation. But setting up an effective system isn’t easy, especially in companies with several thousand employees.

So how do you go about it? What are the real obstacles? What solutions are being considered? Focus.

New ways of working and their impact.

Hybrid working and the flex office have changed the rules of the game in large companies. Gone are the days when everyone had their own office: they can move wherever they like, depending on their needs and the availability of space. On paper, it’s flexible and efficient.

But in practice, it poses real problems.

Office occupancy becomes unpredictable. Some areas become overcrowded, others virtually empty, making it difficult to plan meetings and coordinate teams. Employees waste time looking for a place to work or working in spaces that are ill-suited to their needs, and managers have to constantly reorganise resources.

In this context, office booking space becomes an essential tool for regaining visibility & structuring space. It makes it easier to anticipate occupancy, ensure a fair distribution between sectors and facilitate team coordination.

But setting up an effective system on a large scale is not easy! You have to reconcile availability, flexibility & adoption by thousands of employees. It is precisely this complexity that illustrates the main challenges faced by large companies.

The challenges of office booking space for large companies.

1. Organisational complexity.

Large companies have to deal with an extremely fragmented physical and organisational structure. There are a multitude of sites, floors, open spaces, meeting rooms and specialised areas.

Added to this is the diversity of uses and local constraints : a head office does not have the same needs as a regional office, an open space for engineers does not function in the same way as an open space for sales staff, and certain areas are subject to specific rules (security, confidentiality, restricted access).

At the same time, internal logic is sometimes contradictory: one department may favour massive teleworking, while another requires a strong physical presence. Some departments work staggered hours, while others work a normal day. Harmonising all these practices within a single booking system is a real headache.

The booking tool must therefore be capable of synchronising all these variables, without becoming too cumbersome to use. This means fine-tuning the rules (by site, by floor, by department), while keeping an overview for managers.

Bear in mind that if it is too rigid, teams won’t be able to use it, and if it is too flexible, it becomes confusing and less effective.

2. Managing availability.

Here, the real challenge is not just knowing how many offices are free at any given time, but making this information useful and exploitable. All too often, there is space available, but it is poorly distributed and badly signposted. As a result, some employees think that there is « no more space », while dozens of workstations remain unoccupied elsewhere in the building or on another floor.

Another critical point is predictability. Teams need to know not only where there is space left, but also to anticipate future occupancy: which days are busy, in which areas, and for which departments? Without this visibility, booking becomes a game of chance and generates tensions as soon as a sector is saturated.

Finally, the nature of the needs must be taken into account. An available position is not necessarily a suitable position: a developer will need a desk with a double screen, a project team will need a collaborative room, an HR department will need a quiet space for interviews. Managing availability therefore means going beyond the simple number of available desks: it means matching the right spaces to the right uses.

3. Fairness between employees.

Managing availability is not enough: access to offices must also be fair & adapted to the needs of each individual. Some employees are looking for double-screen workstations, quiet areas or specific configurations to be productive.

Without clear rules, the best workstations can be monopolised by certain departments, while others find themselves relegated to less suitable areas, leading to frustration.

A good reservation tool should therefore allocate workstations transparently, taking into account both actual usage & individual needs.

Some systems even allow you to reserve specific areas for certain departments (booking zone): for example, R&D or HR, and limit the flex office to these areas to better meet operational constraints.

This is what is possible with the Sharvy desk booking solution.

In large organisations, maintaining this fairness while managing availability in real time is a major challenge. Without an intelligent tool capable of combining individual preferences, service constraints & actual occupancy, booking risks becoming a source of injustice rather than productivity.

4. The employee experience.

A booking tool should not add complexity to day-to-day operations: on the contrary, it should simplify access to workspaces. If the interface is cumbersome, unintuitive or too time-consuming, employees will quickly abandon it and revert to informal practices (post-it notes, unauthorised occupation of desks), which negates the whole point of the system.

Simple booking is therefore crucial: it only takes a few clicks to find and book a suitable workstation, whether it’s an individual office, a meeting room or a collaborative workspace.

5. The technological and security aspects of office reservation.

In a large company, an office reservation tool cannot operate in silo. It has to integrate with existing systems: HRIS, IT, company messaging systems and calendars. Without this interconnection, employees find themselves juggling several platforms, which reduces adoption and multiplies errors.

The question of data security is just as central. A booking tool can collect sensitive information such as working hours, work habits and absences. This data falls within the scope of the RGPD and requires impeccable processing. The slightest flaw can undermine employee confidence, as well as posing a major legal risk for the company.

Finally, technical reliability cannot be overlooked. A breakdown, like a recurring bug, can paralyse the organisation: meetings impossible to plan, teams dispersed for lack of available office space. In a large-scale environment, the robustness of the solution is just as important as its functionality.

In conclusion

In large companies, organising workspaces is a real challenge. An effective desk-booking tool doesn’t just show which spaces are free: it has to manage availability in real time, take account of employees’ needs and preferences, and adapt to the complexity of departments and sites.

However, a well-deployed and well-configured desk booking solution transforms these constraints into fluidity, facilitates collaboration and makes office organisation much simpler for everyone.

Got a question? Check out these FAQs!

Why is a simple Excel spreadsheet not enough to manage offices?

In large companies, travel and schedule changes are constant. Employees may work remotely on certain days, or travel for meetings, and these movements are often unpredictable.

A simple, static Excel spreadsheet cannot reflect these dynamics in real time: it quickly becomes obsolete and a source of errors.

What’s more, it doesn’t allow you to manage priorities and individual preferences (quiet desk, dual screen, proximity to the team, etc). A dedicated booking tool offers a centralised view, automates notifications, facilitates rapid reassignment of workstations and provides statistics on actual office occupancy.

Can all departments use the same booking tool?

Yes, a single tool can be used by all departments, but it needs to be flexible enough to manage rules specific to each team, and to each area (HR, R&D, etc).

For example, in a large company, needs are not homogeneous: some teams can benefit from a complete flex office with shared spaces, while others need fixed workstations & quiet areas for specific missions.

The tool must therefore enable different rules to be defined for different departments and floors, while providing a common interface so that everyone can book easily.