More employees, same space: How ILF Austria solves the space challenge with data instead of gut feeling

ILF Consulting Engineers Austria is part of an internationally active engineering and consulting company. With more than 3,500 employees worldwide, the consulting group delivers complex projects in the fields of energy & climate protection, water & environment, transport & urban spaces, as well as resources & sustainable industry. ILF Austria employs more than 800 people across six locations and recently doubled its revenue from €75 million to €150 million within five years.

However, this growth also brought new challenges. An increasing number of employees, limited office space, and a growing hybrid work model were difficult to reconcile. At the same time, the existing space issues repeatedly led to significant organizational and communication efforts, heavily involving senior management. As a result, ILF Austria began searching for a flexible solution for workplace management.

ILF Austria’s rapid growth brought a key challenge: office space became limited while more and more employees were working in a hybrid model. With up to 100 days of remote work per year and a high number of part-time employees, not everyone was in the office at the same time. Yet not everyone could always find a desk. Each department had been assigned a fixed number of workstations based on the requirements defined by department heads. In reality, however, it often turned out that some departments occupied a disproportionate amount of space, while others had too little.

We constantly had to hold discussions between department heads about how to allocate the space. And management ended up acting as the referee. And I no longer wanted to be the referee.

Josef P. Mayr, Managing Director at ILF Consulting Engineers Austria GmbH

A system was therefore needed to manage workstation allocation more fairly — and to relieve management from constantly mediating. The solution had to be user-friendly and easy to administer, work across multiple locations, and be implemented with minimal effort.

In January 2025, ILF Austria introduced deskbird and now manages around 800 workstations with the platform. The decision to choose deskbird was influenced by the fact that its sister companies, ILF Germany and ILF Saudi Arabia, were already using the solution with consistently positive feedback. Today, approximately 791 employees in Austria actively use the platform at the two largest locations in Vienna and Innsbruck. The detailed usage data helps management identify the actual needs of individual departments and manage them efficiently.

Thanks to the extremely short response times of the deskbird support team, onboarding was completed in a short period of time. This enabled ILF Austria to implement deskbird smoothly step by step — first in Vienna, then in Innsbruck.