"We needed a tool to ensure the changeover to flex-office"

With over 1.2 million users and 420 million euros exchanged, Pumpkin is a payment and refund application that continues to grow. Initially based in Lille, Pumpkin also opened its offices in Paris and now has over 90 employees. So used to a face-to-face corporate culture, the company has adapted to the challenges of hybrid work, but not without difficulty...

The need for a hybrid work management tool

"We needed a simple and intuitive tool to ensure the changeover to flex office"

Indeed, Anissa, a human resources officer, explains their need for an effective software tool to implement the company's remote work policy. At Pumpkin, they allow three days of remote work per week and the rest of the time they work in their Paris and Lille offices. They quickly faced the problem of who is where and when.

With plans to open new offices in Lille, Pumpkin was also facing a real problem with space management in its offices in the north of France. There was a clear need to have an overview of the organisation of employees within the company, but without 'monitoring' them, as Hugo, Pumpkin's co-founder, tells us. The challenge is not to monitor employees, but to ensure the proper use of shared workspaces and to adapt the corporate culture to remote work.

See also: Corporate culture in the age of hybrid work

remote work a new part of Pumpkin's corporate culture

Today, Pumpkin's hybrid work policy is no longer a consequence of the pandemic restrictions. It is an integral part of their corporate culture where employees can remote work three days a week. Indeed, Pumpkin wants to rethink the very purpose of the office, which used to be just a place for an employee. The flex office now allows them to approach this space as a place to meet and share, where one can alternate between working in teams, transversally with other teams or alone. It is therefore obvious that it is preferable for members of the same team to be present in the office at the same time to encourage exchanges and collaboration.

However, how do you ensure that your employees are in the office on the same day and that there are still places available?

"We started with a Google spreadsheet, it's a great improvised tool but not at all adapted to our needs. We then used another solution, Semana, without success with the teams," says Hugo.

Like many companies, Pumpkin sought to organise its transition to remote work with the means at hand... an Excel spreadsheet shared between all employees. However, this tool, with its low team buy-in, did not allow for the collection of sufficiently precise data on employees' use of the offices. The adoption of a desk booking solution, Semana, was subsequently not enough to win team buy-in and generate usage that met the need. A simple, quick-to-implement tool was therefore needed that would be adopted by all users of Pumpkin's workspaces.

How does the deployment of Deskare help Pumpkin in its flex-office management?

Deployed in June 2020, Deskare's features provide valuable assistance to Pumpkin's HR and managers. Anissa explains that Deskare represents a real time saver for her work because the solution answers all their problems.

Office overcapacity is avoided, the calculation of remote work allowances paid to employees working remotely is simplified, and the statistics collected make it possible to create a corporate culture adapted to employees' habits. Indeed, Deskare allows managers, HR or Office Managers to obtain a dashboard with precise metrics on the use of workspaces. And above all, users can easily find out the situation (remote work or on-site) of one of their colleagues to work with them!

See also : 5 things to know about the remote work allowance

The success of Deskare's deployment at Pumpkin depends on user adoption. Hugo, the co-founder, points out that thanks to Deskare's many integrations, employee adoption has been greatly facilitated. He gives a special mention to the integration with Slack, which asks users to confirm their week in a single click!

If you are organising your company's transition to flex-office yourself, or if you would like to know more about how Deskare can help you organise your teams' remote work, let's meet!