Global Hotdesk Management: From Spreadsheets to Self-Service

The Problem

Before this engagement, hotdesking across the client’s 30+ global offices ran entirely on manual effort, and every office ran it differently. Employees emailed their local office manager to request a desk, and that office manager tracked availability in a daily spreadsheet. There was no standard process, no shared system, and no visibility for employees into who else would be in the office or where.

The fragility of this approach became clear whenever an office manager was unavailable. With no backup process in place, each office improvised its own workaround, some offices had informal chains of coverage, others simply had no system at all until the manager returned. Multiply that inconsistency across 30+ offices worldwide, and the result was an unreliable, labor-intensive process with zero usable data behind it. Office managers had no way to answer basic questions about their space, how often desks were actually used, when peak periods occurred, or whether their office was over- or under-provisioned, without manually combing through weeks of spreadsheet history.

The Approach

We were engaged to identify a new solution end to end: assess the existing process, design a replacement, document the implementation plan and its budget impact, build the solution, test it, pitch it to stakeholders, and carry it through full global implementation.

The core of the new system was a full Microsoft Places implementation, replacing the ad hoc spreadsheet-and-email process with a self-service booking experience. Employees could see real-time desk availability, book their own space, and, critically, see which of their team members were also going to be in the office on a given day, restoring a piece of in-office coordination that the old system never provided.

Behind the scenes, we built a custom Azure Automation solution using PowerShell to solve the reporting gap the client had never had a way to close. The automation tracked both desk and room utilization rates and peak usage/occupancy trends across every office, then used an app registration and the Microsoft Graph API to deliver that data directly to office managers as scheduled email reports. The reports were kept intentionally simple, plain text summaries rather than a polished dashboard, since the priority was getting reliable, actionable data into managers’ hands, not building something elaborate. Rather than a rigid, one-size-fits-all format, we designed the reporting output so office managers could take the underlying data and use it however best fit their specific office, whether that meant adjusting desk counts, informing a lease renewal conversation, or simply understanding their own space better.

The Outcome

The rebuild delivered improvements across three fronts at once. Office managers were freed from daily manual tracking entirely, replaced by an automated system that ran itself across all 30+ offices. Every office now operated on the same standardized process, closing the gap where inconsistent, manager-dependent workarounds used to live. And for the first time, office managers had real usage data in hand, utilization rates and occupancy trends, they could use to make informed, office-specific decisions about their space.

On the employee side, the shift to self-service was just as significant: instead of emailing a request and waiting, employees could check availability and book a desk themselves, while also seeing which of their team members would be in office that day, turning a purely administrative fix into a better in-office experience.