Space / Back to Work

Update Available Rooms for Back to Work

Once you map out your safe distancing circles , you likely need to make some offices unavailable as they do not condone to safety distancing guidelines. Additionally, you can take rooms offline for other reasons, such as cleaning or general maintenance required on the room.

Marking rooms as unavailable for occupancy:

  • enables space planners to place returning employees in the appropriate rooms
  • removes the rooms the list of available hoteling rooms for those employees who book rooms for one-day use.

You may wish to work with the rooms of one department at a time. For example, you might start with the offices of a department that is critical to return as soon as possible. In this case, you can use the Space Console's features to search for rooms of a specific department so that you can consider these rooms first.

The Room Status Field

When updating the availability of rooms (either for safe distancing or other reasons), you edit the Room Status field of the Rooms table. You can choose from three values:

Value Description
Available The room is available for occupancy. The Safe Distancing action draws a distancing circle for this room.
Do Not Use

The room should not be used for occupancy. The Safe Distancing action ignores rooms with this status.

You can use this value to cover a range of situations. In addition to safe distancing adherence, you can use this status for any room that you do not want to be occupied by returning employees. For example, you might want to take a room off line because it is in an area with poor air circulation. Or, perhaps a room needs maintenance attention, such as painting. By making the room unavailable for returning employees, you can address the maintenance issue now so that the room is in good shape when you return to full occupancy.

Requires Cleaning

The room should not be used for occupancy because it requires cleaning. The Safe Distancing action ignores rooms with this status.

For example, your site might do a deep cleaning of all rooms before allowing employees to re-enter the site. You can set all rooms to Require Cleaning and then update the status once a room is deep-cleaned.

Once employees return and you are maintaining rooms according to good safety procedures, this status is handy for updating a room when an employee will no longer use the desk. For example, if an employee is moving to a new space or leaving the company, you will want to do a deep cleaning of their office before assigning it to another employee.

If you implement hoteling as part of your return-to-work strategy, the hoteling workflow rules use this value to enforce a workflow that automatically sets a room to be cleaned after it is used. See Hoteling Procedure and Workflow Rules .

After updating the Room Status with the below procedures, you may wish to highlight the floor plan by room status .

Procedure: Update Room Availability Based on Distancing Requirements

  1. In the Space Console, use the Advanced Form to restrict by Department Code and a Room Status of Available. This will enable you to focus on the rooms of one department at a time.
  2. Select the floor plan you wish to work with.
    • The floor plan highlights available rooms for the specified department. You can now focus on just this set of rooms.
    • If the Organizations tab on the right, click "Selected Floors Only" and "Apply Current Restriction." The tab shows the number of available rooms belonging to this department.
  3. Use the Space Console's features to draw safe distancing circles on the floor plan.
  4. Review the red intersecting distancing circles. For rooms whose distancing circles intersect, you need to set one of the room's Room Status to Do Not Use.
    • For example, for rooms clustered together in a circle arrangement as shown below, you can mark alternating rooms as Do Not Use.
    • When determining to make a room unavailable, you can review its details by selecting the room and clicking View/Edit Selected Rooms. The resulting form presents the room's values. Review these values to determine if you want to take this room offline.
  5. Select a set of rooms that have intersecting lines. In the below example, the user has selected eight alternating rooms, indicated with black diagonal slashes.
    select_rooms.png
  6. Click the "View/Edit Selected Rooms" button, located at the top of the floor plan.
  7. In the resulting form, set the Room Status for these rooms to "Do Not Use."
    room_list_do_not_use.png
  8. Save the Selected Rooms and Employees form.
  9. When you return to the drawing, you will see that the drawing has updated the distancing circles. Continuing with the above example, the red circles are removed from the eight selected rooms and they are no longer highlighted because they do not match the restriction (they no longer have a Room Status of Available). The circles in the adjoining rooms are redisplayed in green as these rooms are marked as Available and they no longer have intersecting distancing circles.
    select_rooms_after.png
  10. In the Organizations tab, notice that the number of rooms has been updated to reflect the rooms you made unavailable. The department now has fewer rooms in which to house its employees.
  11. Continue reviewing the distancing circles and making rooms unavailable for occupancy until you have no intersecting red circles remaining on the floor plan.

Procedure: Update Room Availability Based on Other Reasons

Follow this procedure when you want to update room status without considering distancing circles. For example, you might want to indicate rooms that require a deep cleaning before employees return to work. Or, you may want to take rooms offline because they have other outstanding issues, such as requiring maintenance.

  1. In the Space Console, load the floor plan on which you want to review rooms.
  2. Optionally, use the search features to restrict the floor by department if you want to review the rooms for one department at a time.
  3. Select a set of rooms whose Room Status you want to update.
  1. Click the "View/Edit Selected Rooms" button, located at the top of the floor plan.
  1. In the resulting form, set the Room Status for these rooms to "Do Not Use" or "Requires Cleaning"
  2. Save the Selected Rooms and Employees form.

Grid Procedure (edit one room at a time)

As an alternative procedure, you can update an individual room's Room Status and using the Space Console's grid. This method is handy when you have just one room to edit and you do not need to first see its distancing circles or see its location on the floor plan.

  1. Load the Space Console, and search for the rooms you want to update; for example, rooms of a certain department or room category.
  2. Select the Space tab.
  3. In the Rooms grid, locate the room you want to edit and click the pencil-shaped icon.
  4. In the resulting form, change the value of the Status field.
    room_edit_grid.png
  5. Save the form.
  6. If you now move to the drawing and refresh it by clicking the Safe Distancing icon, you will see that this room does not have a safe distancing circle because its Status in not Available and the safe distancing circles apply only to available rooms.

Back to

Back-to-Work Occupancy Plan Procedure

Back-to-Work Hoteling Procedure