Even as the coronavirus crisis continues, things are starting to return to some kind of routine at multiple Wix offices around the world. In locations where there has been an improvement in the situation, officials are slowly loosening some restrictions on gatherings, transportation, and businesses activities. In light of this, many of our global office locations are returning to work in line with those loosened restrictions.
And yet, things still aren’t 100 percent back to how they were before the coronavirus. One of the common features of new health guidelines are restrictions on the number of people that can work in a given space, mostly in order to maintain two meters distance between all employees.
That has presented a considerable challenge for our employees. How can we allow team members who want to return to our offices the opportunity to do so, when we often don’t have the physical space to allow all of our employees to maintain the required physical distance?
Like all of the challenges we face as a business, we looked to our own Wix tools to help us solve the problem. In this case, we used Wix Bookings to build an office booking system that lets our team members sign up for a space in the office, so we can coordinate who will work on site and who will work from home.
Building the App
Building this app required us to integrate a number of different systems including our employee directory, our time clock system, and an updated list of office space with health limits. Fortunately, with both our Bookings App, and Velo, we were able to build a robust solution that the whole company can use to coordinate what employees are arriving to the office on any given day and to ensure they all have a place to work that is in line with health regulations and ensures their safety.
Bookings was the first obvious choice for our platform. It provides a complete solution for Booking services, appointments, or classes. Bookings gave us most of what we needed right out of the box, letting our employees find a day and time they needed office space, user management, and gave us all of the other backend services we needed to manage the process.
Extending Functionality with Velo
We wanted to bring some additional functionality into the app, and that’s where Velo came in. With Velo, we were able to extend the functionality of Bookings as well as integrate with a number of other services to provide a complete solution.
One of the most important ways we extended Bookings was to allow our team members to book office space across multiple days. Normally, Bookings is intended to allow users to sign up for one specific class or other service. With Velo, we were able to allow our team to sign up for multiple days, making it easy for employees to plan their time at the office in advance.
Additionally, we wanted to make sure that we had an accurate and detailed picture of which employees were coming into the office, and whether they were using the Booking app to reserve a space. We decided to build a dashboard that would present all of these details, but we needed a way to identify which employees were coming in.
So we used Velo, the Wix Bookings API, and an HTTP function to connect our office booking app with our time clock system that keeps track of which employees are in the office. This reported employee attendance to our dashboard allowing us to closely monitor our compliance with health regulations.
The entire development process took just a few short weeks from the initial idea to the app being released to our employees. For us, it helped us understand more deeply the flexibility our tools can provide. In this time, we know that our users and businesses all over the world are working hard to adapt to the rapidly shifting landscape of health restrictions and regulations that the coronavirus crisis has brought about. In that light, it’s more important than ever for us to look deeply at our own tools to ensure they are ready to help our users navigate this challenging time.
