Meet
IU, a leading education provider
IU International University of Applied Sciences is one of Germany’s leading education providers. Every single day, they revolutionize education by changing the rules of the game. IU offers a wide range of study programmes for undergraduate and graduate students in different fields and formats. With more than 75’000 students every year, they aim at making education accessible for everyone.
Today, IU employs over 1’500 people in 30 locations (and remote) across Germany. Their “Culture of Everyone” puts humans at the heart of everything and has helped them to become a certified Great Place to Work. Currently, most IU employees work from home between two and three days a week, whilst coming into the office the rest of the week.
Challenge
Different needs for different situations
Actually, IU already partly went flexible in 2020, in selected locations. The pandemic had increased the need for flexible working solutions and IU was amongst the first companies to establish this concept. Most of IU’s office spaces have dedicated areas for focus work, collaborative work, meetings, project spaces or socializing.
However, their first desk booking solution was not able to handle a large amount of data and cater for flexible needs. Therefore, IU went on the hunt for an easy, intuitive solution that suited all their 30 different locations and specific needs. In addition, the solution should provide fast reactions in case of changing requirements or troubleshooting. Finally, it should be simple and fast for employees to book a desk in the office of their choice.
Solution
A tailor-made approach
IU introduced the deskbird solution in summer 2021 for 800 employees in Germany. After a project kickoff and some adjustments of the product tailor-made for IU, they announced the launch of deskbird as their new desk booking tool just a week before start. Through the deskbird mobile or desktop app, IU employees can now pick a date, easily see where their colleagues are sitting, then book a desk in the area they would like to work from.
Despite the short notice, employees were happy with the solution and loved the easy and fast bookings. From top management to working students, deskbird was accepted by every IU game changer without hesitation. And if anything, IU employees only had constructive feedback on how deskbird could improve their software even further.
We were looking for an easy, intuitive tool that could still cater for all our needs. Especially as the project involved a restructuring of our office layout, it was amazing how flexible deskbird was with our changing needs. With deskbird, we have found a software that offers great user experience along with all the features we wished for, especially SSO and access restrictions which were very relevant for us!
Jacqueline Schuster
Senior Project Lead HR
