Meeting Room Booking Systems: The Key to an Efficient Office
In the era of flexible, open-plan offices, the meeting room holds an essential purpose. People need spaces to connect, collaborate and meet with clients.
In fact, over 50% of respondents in a recent Gensler survey said scheduled meetings, impromptu catchups and socializing are the main reasons they want to come back to the office. It's on workplace teams everywhere to make that possible for their people. One way to enable meetings: intuitive and effective meeting room scheduling systems.
Let's discuss some of the biggest challenges in booking and maintaining conference room schedules. We'll explore the benefits of using meeting room booking software to help you make meetings a real possibility for your people.
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Challenges with maintaining and booking meeting rooms
One of the most common challenges in the open office environment is scheduling a meeting rooms. With hybrid teams and international clients conference rooms become a bridge between offices. When anything is in demand, you’ll run into challenges with its use, and the humble meeting room is no exception.
No shows
Whether the meeting got canceled, the timing changed, or the parties skipped a recurring event - we all know the challenge of abandoned room bookings. The biggest challenge in no-show bookings is that it can affect every other booking in the office. With last-minute cancellations or no-shows:
- People don’t have the opportunity to use the room effectively (and might take a room that’s too big or too small for their needs).
- Employees try to make a meeting come together outside of the booking system (see ‘Theft” below).
- The usage of your conference spaces declines, and the data you have on utilization can become skewed.
Theft
When an office room isn’t available for scheduling due to a no-show, people may take matters into their own hands by simply “taking” the space they need. Unfortunately, this can invalidate the entire booking system; from pushing another party out of the room by claiming necessity (“Sorry, we really need this space.”) or the trickle-down effect of other meeting room thefts. (“Someone stole ours, so we have to steal yours.”). Ultimately, who gets what room will usually come down to a matter of hierarchy or project sensitivity. It can also cause friction between employees or departments.
Squatting
Similar to theft, squatting happens when someone takes over a conference room for themselves. It’s not only poor form, it also takes up an entire room of usable space to meet the needs of a singular staff member.
Overcrowding - Space Management
In the age of social distance and staged re-openings, scheduling a conference room that is too small is more serious business than in the past. Before, overcrowding simply meant latecomers didn’t get a seat. Now, it might promote the transmission of germs within the office. That's why creating and maintaining good social distancing protocols within your meeting room spaces is key. This is made much easier with a meeting room booking system with capacity limits in place.
Cleaning
Lapses of etiquette, while annoying in the pre-COVID world, also take on new significance in terms of cleaning. Enhanced cleaning protocols are necessary parts of any office plan. It’s valuable to have the means to “take a meeting room offline” automatically between uses.
Benefits of using software for booking meeting rooms
Booking software used to schedule and maintain your office real estate can do a lot more for your office than just help organize bookings. From streamlining processes to ensuring safety protocols are followed, the benefits of using an interactive system are considerable. Workplace leaders can collect valuable data and better understand how their office spaces are being used, making future planning more effective.
The manual method of booking
Some offices rely on a manual conference room booking systems, relying on sign-up lists taped to walls. While these methods may seem like a low-effort fix, they can quickly lead to confusion and friction points in administration. Here are some of the hallmarks of a manual system:
- The sign-up system is usually the responsibility of the closest admin to the office, who becomes the gatekeeper and the impromptu mediator for any issues.
- The manual method depends requires everyone to learn the task of actually booking. When that doesn’t happen, issues are sure to follow.
The interactive booking system
An interactive meeting room booking system removes many of the friction points associated with managing the office. The system works like this:
- For booking, the meeting coordinator can log into the mobile app from their phone or a conference room touchscreen and find an available space.
- Outside of the dashboard, you can check an interactive map for room availability based on time, date, capacity, meeting type or other requirements.
- Based on the choices available, the coordinator can book the room, invite guests, and automatically sync with their Google or Outlook calendar.
- At go time, the coordinator can check into the meeting room; if the check-in fails to occur, the room becomes available for others who may need it (this is often called AMP or “abandoned meeting room protection").
- When the meeting is over, it can be scheduled for cleaning or return to service for others to use.
Automated booking software makes scheduling, canceling, and using conference room spaces the right way convenient and more accessible.
10 key features of a meeting room booking system
When researching your needs for an online booking system, it helps to know some of the features that are built into top-of-class platforms. These features make it easy for people to get into a room easily, for administrators to make data-driven decisions about the space, and for facilities to keep the spaces healthy and in working order.
Here are the top 10 features you should look for when considering a meeting room management software solution.
1. Real-time data
An interactive system can give you the most up-to-date information on who is in the office, where they are, and free meeting rooms available for collaboration.
2. Capacity-specific booking
Scheduling a room is easier when you have a reference for booking. Capacity information makes it easy to get the perfect space for your needs. Hot desking features are a bonus.
3. Purpose-made selection
A well-built booking solution will make recommendations based on the type of meeting you want to conduct. All-hands? One on one? Final round of interviews? Each space lends itself to different tasks, and your booking system can match you with the right one.
4. Touchless booking
Touchless systems are fast becoming a must-have for maintaining the health of an office. With the right booking system, you can select a meeting space from a meeting room display, or right from your personal laptop or mobile device.
5. At-a-glance wayfinding
If you’re new to the office, booking a room should be easy, and getting there should be as well. With digital maps and room signage, you can get to the meetings and people you need quickly and easily.
6. Abandoned meeting protection
The most important in a meeting room are the ones that don’t happen. These ghosted get-togethers can eat into the efficiency and ROI of your office. A good, interactive booking system will deal with these lost opportunities automatically, putting valuable space back into play.
7. Calendar integrations
Being able to get everyone on board with the meeting time, date, and location is easier when the booking system can talk directly with meeting room calendars. It can send reminders, give directions, and immediately update participants on changes to the plan.
8. Messing app integration
When a powerful office communication tool can double as a booking system, your meetings can come together more easily. Integrations with messaging apps like Slack or Microsoft Teams is the hallmark of an advanced automatic meeting room booking system.
9. Data analytics
What you get out of a conference room is more than just space. With use analytics, you can better understand how and when your office is scheduling different spaces, allowing you to make data-driven decisions about your space and future adjustments to your flexible space plan and utilization.
10. Issue ticketing
Things don’t always go as planned; so, the ability to report an issue with a meeting room with the touch of a screen is an important feature in your booking system. With this feature in place, issues can be addressed quickly and easily, and everyone can get back to work more quickly.
Why a meeting room booking system is more important than ever
While ease of use and great integrations are certainly selling points, perhaps the most compelling reasons for using a meeting room booking system right now is the ability to keep your staff safe as they venture back into the office space in the era of COVID-19. There are a few ways in which an integrative system can help you make the best choices as your company comes together in this new world.
Contact tracing
Being back in the office also means being responsible for knowing who is in-house, who is visiting, when, and for how long. Because contact tracing within the office is one of the best ways to mitigate the transmission of the novel coronavirus in the event of a positive test result, it’s valuable to have a way to quickly and easily assess primary contacts. Using the data from check-ins, meeting room bookings, and more, you can help your employees stay informed about their potential exposure, and take any necessary steps to limit further spread.
Reducing traffic
The less your employees move around within the office, the fewer opportunities arise for prolonged contact. With a status board, employees can learn who is in the office, where they’re sitting, and how easiest to get there all without leaving their desk. The wayfinding and status features can greatly improve the safety of your office, even as density increases over the course of staged return plans.
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At the end of the day, it's on the workplace team to remove points of friction throughout an employees' workday. Effective meeting room booking systems unlock your office by making scheduling meetings as easy as a tap on your phone or a click of your mouse.
