r/Office_Managers

thanks for the help in my other post! Looking for advice.. so many of our booked meeting rooms go completley unused plus a smaller chunk of desk bookings where people dont show. People book then forget to cancel meanwhile other teams can't find a room. make it make sense?

the tools i been looking at talk about auto release for desk booking and meeting room no show management like book a room and if don't check in within 10 -15 minutes the system releases it. Does it work for people to rebook tho? Like do other people check in and book or just take the empty desk without booking?

Does auto release show someone mid meeting and the room shows "available")?

Have your ghost bookings gone down?

Looking for recs AND policy ideas. I am tired of being the room police and ghost hunter

Multi location office management is the most under discussed topics in this space and it's where a lot of otherwise solid tooling falls apart. workplace software is built around single- office assumptions: one floor plan, one policy set, one timezone. Those assumptions break when you add a 2nd location.

If you run two or more offices, your setup is useful to everyone else reading this especially the folks about to open office #2 assuming their current stack will just scale. A few places single office assumptions tend to break (add your own):

Policies diverge. RTO days, desk-booking rules, and visitor/guest policies often can't be identical across cities let alone across countries.

Booking systems silo. A lot of desk booking /room booking tools treat each location as its own island, so admins end up managing them one at a time.

Floating employees. People who hop between offices break the "one person, one assigned desk" model fast.

Reporting fragments. Use and attendance roll up cleanly for one office, then turn into manual spreadsheet across several.

If you manage 2+ offices, drop a comment with:

Number of locations + rough size of each (desks / headcount).

Same policies everywhere, or different per office? (RTO days, desk-booking rules, etc.)

What multi location desk booking software / multi office room booking system you use if any

How you handle employees who travel between offices.

Analytics: do they roll up on locations automatically or are you doing reports together manually?

Biggest pain point you've hit at multi location scale.

years into managing this office and we switched when we downsized and on paper it made perfect sense - fewer desks than people, hybrid schedule, book what you need and some people sit at the same desk every day but act surprised when someone else "took their spot". Other people don't book at all and show up and sit. The desk reservation spreadsheet I made isnt working because team thinks it's optional. we need a desk booking software but every time  leadership says "is the spreadsheet not working" and I have to find new words for no. If you've moved from spreadsheets to office software did it help or did people complain a new system? don't know if the problem is the tool or the people.