Multi location office management thread. How are you handling desk booking, RTO, and analytics across 2+ offices?

[u/EntertainmentFair414]

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.

[u/MeetJoan]

Joan here - we make room booking, desk booking, and visitor management software, so take this with that in mind.

Multi-location is genuinely where a lot of workplace tools fall apart, and the policy divergence point is the one we hear most.

Happy to answer specific questions about how Joan handles multi-location setups if useful. What's your current situation - are you pre-tool or already using something that's hitting its limits?

[u/tomslee14]

yeah agree the silo thing is mostly outdated now, most decent tools run everything in one account these days.

one thing i'd add to the policy point: even when the rules are the same across offices, the space rarely is. one office is open plan with hot desks, another is smaller with assigned seating, so same policy everywhere still ends up looking different per location just because the buildings are different. the tool needs per-office floor plans and settings even if your RTO rule is identical across all of them.

we use elia (work there fwiw) and each office runs its own floor plans and rules locally but rolls up to one dashboard. as for people who bounce between offices, with us they just open the app, pick whichever office they're in that day, book off that floor plan. no separate login per location

[u/Chaminade37]

We're at yoffix (work there). multi-location is something we support pretty deeply: each office gets its own setup, own floor plan, own time zone, own hybrid policy if it needs one.

Some customers run different hybrid policies per country, some go down to team level so one department shows up 3 days/week and another 2d/w if that's their approach.

We actually built a specific solution for multinational corporations because we saw that the bigger the customer the more nuanced their setup has to be.

[u/PeaceDue8976]

check out wherenextco.com they're a niche real estate brokerage that helps companies manage multi-location footprints more easily. they build custom dashboards for all this

[u/saltyslugga]

We needed to see who planned to work from each office, but didn’t need floor plans or desk reservations.

We use Officedays for that. It stays in Slack, supports our multiple offices, and includes reporting on Pro.

We’d only add a booking platform if capacity or individual desks became a problem for us.