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TST: unlocking potential by making change last
TST is a professional services firm based in the London Bridge area, working across experiential training and events and talent advisory. A team of 50 works with clients in sectors as varied as financial services and engineering.
The work is about unlocking potential by making change last, in people, teams and organisations. TST does that by designing and delivering transformative experiences at work, using science, creativity and human-centred design. Services fall into three areas: Diagnose & Benchmark, Launch & Embed Change, and Develop & Upskill. Each comes at different levels of customisation to suit a range of budgets and requirements, from "As is" existing designs, to a "Fit to you" adapted approach, to "Made for you" built from scratch around an organisation's own challenges.
That mix of client delivery and internal collaboration is exactly why the office still matters. TST's people are in anywhere from one day a month to four days a week. And the team has grown faster than the desks available to it.
A team that had outgrown its own office
Coming back from remote working after the pandemic, TST were in the same boat as a lot of companies tackling hybrid working for the first time. The team had grown larger than the office capacity at the time, and two problems followed from that. Everyone who came in needed a desk to work at. And the meeting rooms needed to stop being double or triple booked.
Both were being handled informally, with no shared view of who was in or which rooms were free.
Back in 2023, our problem was managing hybrid working with a team of 40 people, in an office with 20 desks.
Sam Green
Director of Operations, TST
What TST needed was one tool covering both desks and rooms, simple enough that people would actually adopt it, and right-sized for a single smaller office rather than an enterprise estate. Transparent pricing that made sense at that size mattered too, as did having real reporting on how the office was being used. TST compared a few options and focused in on deskbird early, because it just made sense for them.
Desk and room booking in one place, inside Microsoft Teams
TST went live with deskbird in December 2023, covering desk booking, meeting room booking and the Microsoft Teams integration. The deciding factor was how simple it was to set up the desk and meeting room layout on the correct floor plan. The team has since moved offices twice, and the setup moved with them: 34 desks and four meeting rooms at 207 Union Street today.
We chose deskbird because the UI was easy to use. The Teams integration also helped the system work in the flow of normal work.
Sam Green
Director of Operations, TST
The rollout was deliberately front-loaded. TST set up the floor plan and the Teams integration first, so the tool was as easy and intuitive as possible before anyone saw it. Then they launched at a whole-team meeting, demoing how quick it was to use and communicating the "why": this makes life easier for individuals as well as for the Ops team, not just for reporting.
As with any new system, full adoption took prompting. The Ops team helped people who turned up without a booking to book retrospectively, mediated the occasional desk dispute, and sent regular reminders to update weekly schedules. The analytics and scheduling views made that straightforward to run, showing at a glance which teams and individuals had planned their working location and which had not.
Anchor days that hold, and data the team can trust
Two thirds of the team, back every week
deskbird is now part of how the team plans its week. All 50 people are registered and active, and around two thirds of monthly users come back to the office every single week, a strong return rate for a team of this size.
Since go-live, TST has made 3,650 bookings: 2,424 across the 34 desks and 1,189 across just four meeting rooms. Relative to their number, the rooms are worked harder than the desks, which is what you would expect from a business built on workshops and client sessions.
Wednesday is the anchor day
The weekly shape is clear, with Wednesday the busiest day and Monday the quietest. That is not an accident. TST uses deskbird to manage anchor days for leadership and for individual departments, to make sure they are getting the right levels of collaboration and connection.
The feedback we get from the team is that the automatic check-ins with Workplace Intelligence make life much easier when they attend the office. They can get straight into their work with one less thing to think about.
Sam Green
Director of Operations, TST
Automatic check-ins, cleaner data
TST is among the first deskbird customers using Workplace Intelligence, and it has changed the quality of what they can see. The whole office is mapped, and monitor mapping through deskbird Dock now checks people into their desks automatically. Before that, the numbers relied on accurate planning or manual check-ins, which are never going to be 100% correct.
Sam and the office manager look at the dashboards weekly. The next step is to build up a few months of clean data through deskbird Dock, then review anchor day planning and adherence properly against it.
TST's story is a useful one for any business running a single office with more people than desks. The tool had to be simple enough that 50 people would adopt it, sit inside Microsoft Teams where the work already happens, and cover desks and rooms without a second system. Three years and two office moves later, it still does all three.
deskbird is an ideal hybrid working management system. Easy to set up, easy to use, and easy to analyse, whether you are an individual, a team lead, or reporting to leadership. In fact, I recommended deskbird to a peer last week.
Sam Green
Director of Operations, TST
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