Why Conference Room Management Software Is Essential For Enterprises

Conference room management software improves collaboration, productivity, and space utilization—all of which are critical to a growing organization.

And in our experience, large organizations see the greatest return on their investment in conference room management software. Here’s why.

Conference Room Management Software Improves Space Utilization

The largest organizations typically waste the most space.

And one of the biggest sources of wasted space is conference rooms. The average conference room sits empty 75 percent of the day, according to a benchmarking report from architecture-engineering firm HOK.

That may sound surprising if you’re constantly hearing complaints from employees who can never seem to find a conference room when they need one. This happens for several reasons:

A Disconnect Between Availability And Need

While the majority of conference rooms are designed to accommodate six or more, most meetings take place between just two to four people, according to HOK.

Employees may be reluctant to take up a large room for a private conversation or an informal brainstorming session.

Conference room booking software allows your organization to see which rooms are being used most often and which may be underutilized. With these insights, you can make adjustments to better meet the needs of your workforce—like possibly reconfiguring a large meeting room into two smaller spaces.

Ghost Reservations

When an employee schedules a recurring meeting, they don’t always select an end date—or remember to cancel the room reservation when the meeting isn’t needed.

This results in rooms sitting empty while they appear to be booked.

Conference room management software can be integrated with IoT sensors to eliminate these “ghost” reservations. When sensors don’t detect anyone in a reserved room after a set period of time—for instance, 15 minutes—you can create a workflow within your conference room management software to make the room available again.

False Scarcity

In larger companies, employees may be less familiar with the layout and composition of other parts of the office. If all of the nearby rooms are already booked during the chosen timeslot, they may feel they have to postpone the meeting. However, there may be plenty of available meeting spaces they just weren’t aware of.

Conference room software makes all of this transparent to your entire organization, whether they are in their own department or at another office that’s unfamiliar to them. They can find all available rooms on their floor or in their building simply by pulling up a mobile app.

And if they happen to be walking by a set of closed doors, they can also find out who has reserved the room and when it will be available simply by tapping a conference room scheduling panel.

Double-Booked Conference Rooms

What’s even more frustrating than realizing a room you needed was sitting empty? Encountering a room that’s been double-booked.

While Outlook is still one of the most popular email clients, it’s not ideal for conference room scheduling because it allows rooms to be double-booked. If an employee designates an event as “All day” in Outlook, the room selected for the meeting will still appear as free and can be reserved by other Outlook users. This allows multiple employees to book the same space at the same time, which they, unfortunately, won’t discover until it’s time for the meeting.

Conference Room Management Software Improves Productivity

The average employee attends 60 meetings a month, or about three per day.

Think about it; that’s almost half their day. The time it takes to find and book an available meeting room may not seem like much in comparison, but even if it’s just 10 minutes a day, that time really adds up.

Kate Lister, president of Global Workplace Analytics, has developed an equation to quantify the financial impact of making incremental improvements in employee productivity.

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.

For that same cost, you could hire an additional 20 employees!

Conference Room Management Software Improves the Employee Experience

An employee’s ability to move freely throughout the office and choose the spaces where they can work best has a big impact on how they feel about their workplace.

And as the war for top talent gets more competitive, it’s crucial for companies to differentiate themselves to attract and retain employees.

With conference room management software, employees have the power to:

• Find and reserve a conference room
• Invite guests from their contacts list
• Connect their preferred calendar tool for automatic syncing
• Receive notifications via chat platforms like Slack
• Reserve special equipment and request services like catering
• Get directions from their location to a meeting room

… all from their mobile device.

In addition to making them more productive, it also removes friction and frustration from their day.

Conference Room Management Software Enhances Facility Management

Conference room management software can easily be integrated with other workplace technology, such as space management and asset management solutions. The integration allows for seamless data transfer and gives facilities managers visibility into how employees engage with the workplace—including where they spend time.

Facilities managers can then use the reporting and analytics features of the conference room management software to turn this data into actionable insights. For instance, they can:

• Adjust cleaning schedules based on room usage
• Identify trends in how employees are using conference room equipment
• Make adjustments to conference room spaces to meet demand

Much More Than Meeting Scheduling

Conference room management software certainly makes it easier to schedule meetings, but it does so much more. That’s why it’s such an important tool for enterprises.

As your organization grows, the ability to gain insights into space utilization, improve employee productivity and satisfaction and be smarter about building management becomes even more important.

Are you ready to see what conference room management software can do for your organization? Schedule a personalized demo today.