Meeting Management Software: 5 Features You Can’t Live Without

It’s safe to say the majority of your employees don’t get particularly excited about meetings.

But face-to-face meetings and video conferences are critical for business success, which means they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

To make meetings more efficient and productive (and, frankly, less painful for your employees) you need to take advantage of meeting management software. But there’s a caveat: not all meeting management software is created equal. You need to be confident you invest in the right solution; otherwise you risk making the already-delicate situation worse.

Here are five features the meeting management software you use must have.

Meeting Management Software: 5 Key Features

A Mobile App For Room Booking

Every meeting management solution allows employees to book a conference room from their computer. But top-tier software takes this functionality a step further with a room reservation mobile app.

Employees can find available meeting rooms, book them and update their reservations from anywhere (even when they’re away from the office.)

With a mobile app for room booking, employees can reserve not only conference rooms, but workstations, collaboration spaces and quiet areas—even parking spaces.

In an agile environment that uses activity-based working, office hoteling or hot desking, this feature is crucial.

Digital Signage and Wayfinding Integration

Not only can employees use computers, tablets and smartphones to reserve workspaces, they can also access the meeting management solution from digital signage and wayfinding displays.

This is especially helpful if your organization has a large corporate campus. Employees can look up meeting details, see the availability of nearby rooms and get walking directions.

Your workforce can also see how long until a meeting ends without having to interrupt coworkers. This helps increase productivity since employees don’t have to return to their desks in between meetings; they can just cruise on to the next event on their calendar.

Connections to Other Workplace Technology

Superior meeting management solutions easily connect to your other business software systems, such as your calendar tools (for example, GoogleCal, Outlook or iCloud Calendar). Employees can use their default tool to create an event and have it automatically sync with the meeting management software or vice versa. Either way, the event details are shared between programs with no manual data transfer required.

If your employees use Slack (as 8 million of us do daily) you also want your meeting management software to integrate with it so they can get automatic notifications about their meetings. This includes upcoming meeting reminders and invitation notifications, which contain meeting details such as location and start and end times.

Related: 12 Slack Integrations That Enhance The Employee Experience

Space and Asset Utilization Data

Meeting management software gives you valuable insight into how employees engage with the workplace. You can see which workspaces are reserved more frequently and which seem to be less popular. This will help you determine which changes need to be made to the workplace, such as design improvements or equipment upgrades.

And since employees can use meeting management software to also reserve assets — like monitors and conference call systems—you’ll have better visibility into asset utilization, too.

Integrations with IoT Sensors

Meetings often have to be cancelled at the last minute. But rarely does the meeting organizer remember to also cancel the room reservation. As a result, a space that other people in the office could reserve goes unused since the software shows the room as booked. Unless you use meeting room management software that connects to Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, that is.

By installing IoT sensors and connecting them to meeting management software, you can ensure room statuses are always up to date. When the IoT sensors don’t detect anyone 15 minutes after the reservation start time, the room status is updated and the room is made available to other employees.

You may not have even known what you’re missing without meeting management software. But now that you do, it’s time to consider implementing it. Your employees will appreciate even a small relief from the headaches of meetings.