One of Desana’s customers, a San Francisco based FinTech company, needed to close one of their leased office spaces for refurbishment. Team members would need access to high quality workspace in Lausanne for the 4-month construction period, a requirement the customer could instantly meet using the on-demand network.
Flexibility was the primary motivation for selecting an on-demand network provider. Whilst there was a clear project timeline, there was the need to ensure that unnecessary workspace costs weren’t accrued during the period and that if the project overran teams would continue to have access to quality workspace.
The challenge with fixed flexible membership contracts is that you’re committing to longer term agreements without knowing the real use case for flex within the workforce. With Desana organizations only ever pay for the workspace used. Also, on-demand gives instant access to a global workspace market through a whole market MSA, rather than having to negotiate and manage individual membership contracts for each team member.
The above graph shows spend across the 6 month project. The workspace spend during the onboarding process is zero, as the office refurbishment had not yet started, and so the company only accrued costs based on actual usage, when the office was inaccessible.
There is a clear peak in spend when the office was completely closed and all the team were given access to Desana. This then tailed off as the team were able to return to the office. The advantage of Desana is that should the project have run over they could have continued using flexible workspace easily, while also controlling workspace spend through the activation of individual spend limits.
Activating Desana also provided the team with a wide choice of workspaces. The office being refurbished was in Lausanne, and the image below shows the individual workspace bookings made over the duration of the project:
Because Desana also partners with smaller workspace providers, the team could also access options closer to their homes or enjoy more boutique offerings. Seeing the usage split across different workspaces highlights the benefit of allowing teams to select the best space for their workstyle.
Whilst the on-demand network was rolled out to serve a very specific need, our customer now has access to real-time data from the team over a 4-month usage period. This information can be integrated into their HQ office data and used to help inform future real estate decisions. For example, once on-demand was rolled out to replace the Lausanne office, 14% of bookings made actually took place in Geneva. The graph below also shows how long the team used spaces, booking desks for an average of 7.66 hours per day. Insights also breakdown asset preferences such as the demand for meeting rooms versus hot desks.