Optimize meeting room bookings with these 7 steps

In-person meetings are one of the collaborative advantages of working in the office, rather than working from home and meeting remotely.

According to research from Verizon, 92% of in-person meeting attendees “value meetings as providing an opportunity to contribute,” suggesting that effective meetings are a big contributor to a positive employee experience. 

In-person meetings get everyone on the same page and also allow your team to build a collaborative culture. Yet the potential for employee and administrative frustration around in-person meetings has never been higher, especially as hybrid work schedules and COVID-19 health concerns have made it challenging to bring people together safely and efficiently. 

Scheduling conflicts such as overlapping meetings, double booking rooms, and unattended reservations/abandoned meetings can create elevated levels of employee frustration in today’s already stressed workplace. Such employee frustration can also spill over into counterproductive finger-pointing at IT, HR, Building Management, or other time-strapped departments. 

Meeting room booking systems enhance employee experience

Having a simple, effective meeting room booking system is a critical success factor in creating a positive employee experience. Real-time and easily transparent communication with relevant stakeholders for scheduling meetings and sharing meeting status updates is absolutely essential for:

(1) avoiding employee (and administrative) frustration 

(2) optimally utilizing meeting room space. 

But how do you get there?

7 steps to optimize meeting room bookings

To optimize meeting room bookings and improve employee experience:

1. Use unique names and digital signage for your meeting rooms.

This allows employees or guests to easily orient themselves in physical spaces or via an app. Digital signs outside each room also notify people about the event taking place and can display the organizer’s contact information, enabling colleagues to reach out if, for instance, the room is shown to be booked but is actually unoccupied.

2. Enable and require attendees to check into meetings ahead of time.

You can set a meeting confirmation window (e.g. 10 minutes) which sets the time by which attendees must check in. If nobody checks into the meeting within the pre-set confirmation window, the meeting room would automatically and immediately be made available for others.

3. Remove no-show meetings automatically.

With meeting room scheduling software, scheduled meeting times are automatically canceled when nobody shows up after a specified amount of time.The value-add here is that you can immediately free up meeting room space for anyone who might need it, enabling you to prevent outdated recurring meetings from piling up. 

4. Get timely analysis to understand how your meeting rooms are being utilized.

With meeting room scheduling software, you can automatically track metrics around how your meeting room space is being utilized and how much time you’ve recaptured by implementing attendee check-ins and other features.

5. Enable attendee contact tracing.

‍COVID-19 has forced offices to keep track of who is meeting in-person as a way to control the spread of the coronavirus. A meeting room booking system enables you to capture details of attendees through check-ins, then trace them when needed.

6. Use meeting room scheduling software.

Put simply, you need a flexible digital platform to set up the steps mentioned above, and in order to optimize both meeting room utilization and enhance employee experience. 

7. Ensure that your room scheduling software integrates with collaboration applications.

Your workplace collaboration tools need to easily integrate with your other collaboration tools, such as Google Workspace or Microsoft Office 365, so team members can share and sync their calendars. It’s a waste of time to adopt meeting room scheduling software that fails to “play nice with others” and sits in a silo.

COVID-19 and hybrid work have made optimizing your meeting room spaces more challenging than ever, but a digital solution like Robin can enable timely communication with stakeholders and eliminate the frustrations that are often the result of double booking, overlapping meetings, and unattended reservations/abandoned meetings. 

Simplifying the process and putting people above places boosts employee experience. 
‍
Want to learn more about how Robin can help you optimize your meeting space and enhance your employee experience? Schedule a demo here.