Double bookings, interrupted meetings and ‘squatting’ are things we’ve all had to deal with if a workplace has one or more meeting rooms.
Here are some classic scenarios…
You book a room via email, you turn up ready to go and the meeting before you has overrun.
You sneak into a room because you’ve forgotten to book, then the person who has booked turns up.
The room you want is booked but there’s no one sat in it.
You can’t see through a door, so you knock and interrupt the MD.
The whole meeting room system has gone to pot and no one in the office takes any notice anymore.
Sound Familiar?
The problem
Post covid, things drastically need to change. With teams often working in a hybrid way, time in the office and especially meeting times need to be adhered to.
With less hours to spare as staff aren’t there day in day out anymore, productivity whist at the office is paramount. If you want to encourage your teams to come in more often, frustrations with doing so need to be eased.
Employee wellbeing is key to productivity, your teams will vote with their feet if you’re not providing them with the tools they need to get the work done.
It’s simply not good enough anymore to send an email to the office manager or book it via outlook. Digital transformation is upon every business and is essential in order to thrive and grow into 2022 and beyond.
The solution
A foolproof way of making sure everyone has a seamless and stress free experience is to invest in a room booking system.
This takes every bit of hassle out of meetings, timeframes are stuck to, its obvious who has what booked, you can clearly see who is in a room (even if you don’t have glass doors) the list goes on.
Lets explore some of the headline benefits and how these tools can supercharge productivity within your organization…
The advantages of a room booking system
As long as you have one or more meeting rooms, you can use a booking system to your business advantage. An added bonus is that it looks sleek, professional and will be sure to impress guests and employees.
No more double bookings or interruptions
Bookings are just that, booked! With a room scheduling system you can schedule via an app on your laptop, phone or device or even use the screen outside the room to do so.
Touch screens outside the room show a colour code so you can easily see if its occupied, when the next meeting is and who booked it. If you need a meeting extension, you can quickly check via your app if there’s anyone booked after you and if so, check for other available rooms.
Bring in all your virtual employees too as you can quickly see which rooms support video conferencing.
Full integration with your kit
Many booking systems work via an API that allows integration with your current meeting room hardware and software. In fact pretty much anything that’s connected via IoT. You can do clever things like switch on the air conditioning prior or fire up the video wall and cast a presentation to maximise everyone’s time.
If you experience any issues with kit during the meeting, you can easily report it on screen too.
Improves etiquette
With an efficient and intuitive booking system in place, its easy to vastly improve meeting room etiquette practically overnight. Many often have a ‘check in’ function that allows instant freeing of the room for a no show.
Being connected to a central system means teams can see exactly what’s booked and when at any given time. If you book via the screen, it will show in here too.
There will be much less ‘squatting’ as bookings can be made direct to screen or on the fly via an app.
No need to knock with a clear indication of who is in the room on the screen outside.
Bringing in a serious system that can be simply managed and owned by everyone encourages mindfulness as to others schedules.
Analytics
An added bonus is that these systems have built in analytics too.
Easily track your organisations meeting patterns, the resources they use and any other statistics you may want to know. This is a huge advantage when it comes to planning and budgets.
By analyzing how your teams work collaboratively, you get invaluable insights into where you can make cost savings and productivity gains.
Speak to the team here at Unity AV if you need any advice, we’ve installed thousands of systems for almost every kind of business. Let us do the hard work and find a meeting room system that works for your organisation and your teams.