Room scheduling software keeps your rooms from becoming a battleground. It may be harder to imagine now, but it wasn’t long ago that meeting rooms were so scarce your employees were booking them months in advance. Some department managers may even have reserved those rooms for the entire year, whether they needed them or not. This led to a lot of wasted space and frustrated employees.
They’ve just evolved. Today, employees are using your workplace more like a hotel, reserving rooms and booking desks on demand.
Here, we’ll show you how room scheduling software solves three pressing problems for enterprises and how to choose the right solution.
That’s a considerable amount of every workday dedicated exclusively to meetings. The time it takes to schedule meetings may not seem like much in comparison, but even if it’s just 10 minutes a day, that time really adds up.
Global Workplace Analytics has developed an equation to quantify the financial impact of making incremental improvements in employee productivity. You can easily apply this to your meeting room booking process.
Assuming the average employee earns $85,000 a year and their time is valued at $.71 per minute, eliminating 10 minutes of wasted time saves them $7.10 per day. If your organization has 1,000 employees working 250 days a year, that’s a savings of $1.8 million.
The best room scheduling software allows employees to see the availability of every meeting space in the office simply by checking the panel or their mobile app.
Aside from saving employees a few minutes every day, it also saves them a lot of frustration. They no longer have to fight with their colleagues over a room or stake their claim to a space weeks in advance.
And when it’s easy to find a place to meet, it’s easier to have quick, impromptu discussions that keep projects moving forward. Employees can reserve conference rooms as well as informal huddle areas where they can brainstorm or give important updates. They can also reserve smaller rooms or booths where they can work quietly or have a closed-door discussion with a colleague.
How often do you try to book a room through your calendar app only to realize they’re all reserved—then walk around the office later and see several rooms sitting empty?
It’s only later that you realize those rooms were reserved for recurring meetings by someone who isn’t even in the office that day. The host could even be someone who is no longer at your organization—but you wouldn’t know that from looking at the calendar. All your employees know is that the room appears to be booked.
These “ghost” conference room bookings are a two-fold problem for organizations, creating frustration for employees while contributing to poor space utilization.
Luckily there’s a simple fix: use room scheduling software that automatically detects and removes unused reservations.
The Zombie Hunter can register meeting attendance two ways:
This feature can be set to a threshold that triggers the cancellation of a room reservation. For instance, if no one checks into a reserved room for a recurring meeting after three consecutive occurrences, the reservation will be removed from the calendar to free up the room for someone else.
Using digital room scheduling panels or a mobile app that requires employees to check in is another way to resolve this issue. The panels connect with your room scheduling software, allowing employees to easily see if a room is available as they’re walking by. If it’s open, they can reserve it simply by tapping on the screen. They can also extend their reservation or end it early. And if no one checks in after a certain period of time, the room can be made available again.
Yet your employees constantly complain they don’t have enough places to meet.
One reason for this disparity is that the sizes and types of conference rooms aren’t meeting the needs of the workforce. According to HOK’s findings, many workplaces have an abundance of large conference rooms and a shortage of smaller spaces. Consider these statistics:
Room scheduling software can give you insights into how often your workplace is actually using each room so you can make adjustments accordingly.
For instance, if you notice several large conference rooms are rarely used, you could add partitions to separate them into smaller rooms.
Or, if you see that rooms with whiteboards are reserved more often than those without, you could improve conference room utilization simply by adding more whiteboards.
Considering your real estate is your second-largest expense, the impact of right-sizing your conference room space could be significant.
(Sources: JLL’s Q3 2018 office outlook, JLL’s 3 30 300 Rule, HOK Benchmarking Report)
Teem’s room scheduling software makes it easy to recapture wasted space by freeing up rooms that are reserved but empty.
One of the most valuable insights you can see is your room recapture rate.
Is the number of minutes employees spent in meeting rooms that were reserved but not occupied. For instance, if Brady reserves a room from 1-2 p.m. but doesn’t check in after 15 minutes, the room becomes available again. Cami needs to discuss some emerging issues with her team and reserves the room from 1:30-2. The extra half hour she spent using that room is considered “recaptured” utilization.
It’s time the room would have otherwise been empty. This is valuable data you can use to calculate your return on investment.
For instance, recommendations to improve your room recapture rate might include enabling the check-in feature on room scheduling panels.
If you’ve looked into a room booking system before, you’ve probably come across a number of free meeting scheduling tools and platforms. You might be wondering whether a paid solution is really worthwhile.
But as the old saying goes, you get what you pay for—and sometimes free meeting scheduling tools can cost you more in the long run.
To get the most return from your investment, consider these important factors:
Traditional hosted software solutions are expensive to maintain and update. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is the preferred choice of modern-day workplace solutions because of its subscription-based pricing model and flexibility.
Any effective room scheduling tool needs to have space management software as its backbone so you can see occupancy and vacancy in real time.
Not all reservable spaces in your workplace have walls. As more organizations shift away from assigned seats to a more agile work environment, desk booking is becoming increasingly attractive. So is the ability to reserve huddle areas.
Your room scheduling software should integrate with calendar apps like Outlook, Google Calendar or iCal, as well as notification platforms like Slack.
The solution you choose should give you actionable data that helps you improve space utilization, fix broken or missing assets and be smarter about maintenance.
No one wants to meet in a room with technology that doesn’t work properly. But you know all too well employees will complain about something a dozen times before submitting a formal request to fix it. Make it easy for them (and your team) with room scheduling software that allows them to submit requests simply by tapping a panel.
Eliminate “ghost” bookings with room scheduling software that integrates with IoT sensors and triggers automated cancellations if sensors don’t detect any activity.
Employees should be able to book rooms via a mobile app, wayfinding kiosk and digital room scheduling panels as well as their computer.
