reserve a workplace locker

Choosing how you work could become more like ordering food from a coffee shop.

Reserve Your Desk and Locker

Many companies are planning to completely redesign and rebuild the inside of their headquarters building around a new vision for office work, while employees are gone. – Betting that the pandemic has changed how we work forever.

Upon the return to office, many people won’t have their own desk.

Instead, those employees will work from home when that makes the most sense, and they’ll come to work when they need to collaborate with others. To do that, they’ll book a parking space, book a desk (and a locker) or a meeting room, or just gather around cafe tables with their colleagues.

Choosing how you work could become more like ordering food from a coffee shop, in the future. At many companies, not everyone will see the same menu, however. Some people will still need to be at the office all the time, depending on their job.

Workers who really want a permanent desk can still have one. But surveys say employees love having the option of working from home and many will choose to keep doing so.

Many companies will face this same issue, should they choose to allow remote work to continue after the pandemic. If they choose to keep private desks, that means a lot of office space will look pretty empty most of the time.

By making desks and lockers shared and bookable, fewer desks (and lockers) are needed.

That leaves the company with lots of extra space to be redesigned, and to focus on collaboration in an environment that feels less like an office and more like a coffee shop.

Technology will be piped in everywhere so that when coworkers gather spontaneously at a table, they can still include anyone still working at home.

That means a mix of assigned lockers (for those in the office everyday) and unassigned or agile smart lockers that can be reserved via the same app that they use to reserve the parking space, desk and lockers.

reserve your locker via a mobile app

MyMetraKey Mobile App — Reserve your locker

The app will show you the locker number, the location and how long you have reserved the locker for. As part of the set up of the app, you decide how you want your lockers numbered, how you describe the location of the lockers (if you have multiple locations), even the duration.

To start:
Select your building, floor or other grouping and location

Our system is flexible. Define your locker locations that are unique to your needs. Such as, the geographic location, building name, floor, department, etc.

Next:
Choose your size (optional), duration (customizable) and confirm

Companies are starting to design their lockers with different sizes of openings for different purposes all within the same bank. This allows flexibility for employees to choose a locker that work for their needs on a specific day. One day it could be to store a coat and/or boots and tomorrow is only a laptop.

Smart lockers easily allow the ability to incorporate different sized lockers. Different sized lockers are optional. We also work with you to define the duration options for the reservation.

Open your locker via the app — open and continue to use or open and release for another user (or for cleaning).

By making desks shared and bookable, fewer desks are needed.

Same thing goes for lockers. Smart Workplace Lockers are an integral piece in the return to workplace strategy.

Many companies are exploring “hoteling,” a de-densification strategy which replaces designated work stations with a booking system for employees to reserve desks and collaboration spaces.

We still have a lot to learn about employee openness to collaboration zones in a post-vaccine world. Will employees feel comfortable? Probably at some point, but there will be residual memories about it being not too long ago that close proximity made me ill.

Most people (and office workers) are looking forward to saying we can get together and innovate again. …. All smart business people know what is important about a great business is human capital and we don’t think the best and brightest employees want to sit at home all day.

Smart Lockers for Agile Work Environments

Agile work environments maximize space utilization and efficiency, and give people access to the entire office by taking away their anchors. Agile seating is a natural replacement for assigned seating because it allows employees to interact with the workplace on their terms. Instead of sitting and working in a way that’s not conducive to their work style or schedule, they’re free to leverage the workplace as a resource.

The densely packed benching in open space are a thing of the past. Instead creative businesses — which means all businesses — should aim for offices that feel like lounges. Creating club-like spaces with some ‘loud rooms’ where solo phone calls can take place and ‘quiet rooms’ for the writing up that needs to be done then and there and can’t wait until you get home or near home. But, aside from these special spaces, the default spaces should have the look and feel of a good café bookshop: with people coming and going, with excellent refreshments, with small clusters of human activity, with furniture arrangements that can allow for smaller or larger groups to gather.