Reimagining the in/out board for hybrid working

Hybrid working poses challenges like: How do you know, from a health and safety perspective who is in the office? And how do you know from an operations perspective if your company hybrid policy is being applied and is working as intended?

These problems can be solved with a revamped version of an old solution. The digital in/out board.

The in/out board concept gives staff the enormous value of being able to see which of their colleagues are in the office – and if they want to meet in person or grab a room they can tell at a glance if that is an option.  

A secondary impact is the increased visibility makes staff more likely to come in themselves - when they see a decent number of colleagues are checked-in and working.

Enabling in/out boards

Getting your staff to check-in when they come to the office is the basis for running an in/out board.  

Using EVA Check-in makes this a low-friction step – especially when you enable geofence check-in.  

A digital in/out board scales easily for hundreds of employees (and things like searching and grouping by office location are easy).  Secondly, it can of course be accessed from anywhere – which is essential given the hybrid working style.

To further improve the usefulness of a digital in/out board further, we’d throw in some other requirements for good measure:

• Just tell us who is in the office now rather than show a full list of all staff
• Security – we’d want to have this accessible only to our team
• Integrate it into Microsoft Teams/SharePoint for two reasons:

        - Microsoft Teams is incredibly popular across businesses. Ideally, we want staff to see information in Teams or SharePoint rather than having to log into another site/system

         - If we can easily click on a person’s name to start a conversation in Teams that would be handy and make it a more streamlined experience.  

The handy combination of EVA Check-in and a bit of Microsoft tech – Lists and Power Automate – makes this all possible.

Here’s an example of the “Who is in?” board. This is the rolled-up office view – showing the total of people checked in at each office:

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And expanded:

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Engineering consultancy uses a digital in/out board

One of our engineering customers, ENGEO,  uses a digital in/out board to understand who is where as their team split their time between site visits, office work, and working from home. This is enabled by using geo-fences and zones - and, of course, using a digital in/out board.

For a comprehensive guide on how to create something similar see our help article or get in touch and we will guide you through it.

You never know, a reimagined in/out board underpinned by EVA Check-in might just make your hybrid work work better.

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