In an open-plan, flexible office environment, it has become even more important to provide gathering areas where employees can discuss important projects, hash out details, and interact with clients and stakeholders.
Almost half of those surveyed by Gensler said coming back to work was due to meetings and socializing. It is the responsibility of organizations at all levels to make this a reality for their employees. It is possible to make meetings more effective by using meeting room scheduling systems.
We’ll discuss how you can use meeting room booking software to increase the productivity of your meetings. As well as some of the challenges to booking and managing meeting room schedules.
Booking and maintaining meeting rooms
The difficulty of scheduling meeting rooms when needed is one of the most common complaints about open office environments. For global clients and hybrid teams, the digital revolution has made it possible to hold cross-company meetings in conference rooms.
Even the humble meeting room isn’t exempt from this rule. You’ll encounter challenges when you need it.
Non-appearance
It is most challenging to have an empty meeting room. Meetings are abandoned when they are cancelled, parameters change, or when recurring events are skipped. Bookings that don’t show up are the most challenging to manage, since they affect all of your bookings.
The meeting room may also be inefficiently used by other meetings (and may end up taking a smaller or larger room than needed).
- Meetings are not unusually scheduled outside the system (see “Theft” below)”.
- You don’t use your conference rooms as often, resulting in skewed statistics.
Stealing
If a room is not available when people are attempting to schedule an appointment, a no-show can lead to desperate measures. It might simply be a matter of “taking” the room they need. People are expelled typically by telling excuses (“Sorry, we really need this room.”) or by a chain reaction of robberies in other conference rooms.
There is often a hierarchy issue or project sensitivities that lead to these disputes (“We took yours, so you stole ours.”) This may also be the cause of friction between departments or employees.
Incontinent
Similar to how thieves steal from other people, squatters take over meeting rooms to get the privacy and space they need (whether they are visitors or someone working on a very focused project). This is both unprofessional and wasteful of space since it takes up an entire room.
Assuring cleanliness
In addition to bothering people before COVID, these lapses have also become even more important after COVID. Enhanced cleaning protocols will be followed as part of any return plan, which is why it’s helpful that the meeting room can be shut off automatically after usage.
Final Thoughts
The workplace team is ultimately responsible for removing any friction that employees experience while at work. The right meeting room reservation system unlocks your business with ease of scheduling meetings.