A taken locker is nobody else’s business

A locker holds personal things: gym kit, medication, chargers, a present you would rather not carry across town. It is also an object in a booking system where, by default, everyone can see who took it.

In an open-plan office that is more visible than it sounds. You can see who keeps a cell for months, who took a second one, who books nothing at all. There is nothing sinister about it — but attention to those details appears by itself, and people start to feel watched.

The Private bookings setting

Lockers now have a privacy setting of their own. It is switched on in the booking rules of a specific locker and is off by default, so existing lockers keep working as before.

With privacy on, exactly one thing changes. Taken cells are still shown as taken — planning around a locker works just as it did. What is hidden is the owner: the name and avatar disappear, and the tooltip simply says the cell is occupied.

One important exception: employees always see their own bookings, and managers see their team's. Privacy closes the casual glance, not the managerial one.

Configured per locker

Privacy is set on an individual locker rather than company-wide, and that matters. A locker in the lobby and a locker in the changing room are different stories: in the first, transparency helps; in the second, it gets in the way.

Lockers with privacy enabled are marked with an indicator in the space list, so an administrator does not have to open each one to see where the mode is on.

The same principle as desks and rooms

If the wording feels familiar, it should. Private bookings already work exactly this way for desks and meeting rooms: occupancy is public, personal data is not.

Lockers were the one resource left out of that rule. Not any more.

When it unblocks a rollout

Locker privacy usually comes up not as a wish from employees but as an objection during rollout: "is it really fine that everyone can see who uses what?" Until now there was no good answer.

Now there is one, and it does not mean giving up on measurement: the company still sees locker utilisation in analytics and knows how many cells are taken and how many are free. Exactly one thing is hidden — somebody else's name on somebody else's cell.