Effective meetings have always been crucial to building a collaborative workplace. Whether they’re daily stand-ups, enterprise-wide conferences, or ad-hoc sessions, meetings help to ensure employees throughout an organisation can work cohesively towards shared goals.
In recent years, the number of meetings employees take part in on a day-to-day basis has increased drastically, thanks in part to the increase of hybrid and remote working practices. According to some studies, there are around 55 million meetings held in US workplaces every week.
However, as the workplace continues to evolve, businesses should remember there’s more to hosting efficient, valuable meetings than choosing the right collaboration software. Teams also need to ensure they can effectively reserve spaces for hybrid meetings, distribute resources effectively, and avoid schedule overlaps. That’s where meeting room booking systems come in.
Meeting room booking systems are becoming increasingly crucial in the age of hybrid work, businesses to effectively distribute meeting space resources to staff members quickly, and efficiently. The question is, how do you choose the right meeting room booking platform?
Step 1: Define the Problems You Want to Solve
Meeting room booking systems can help companies to eliminate a number of common space allocation problems. In any workforce, there are limited resources available for teams to use at any given time. Conference spaces need to be managed effectively to minimise the risk of double bookings, stolen rooms, and team conflicts.
Different meeting room booking systems can provide companies with various solutions for tackling a host of problems. Getting the most out of your investment starts with defining which issues you need to overcome, and what goals you want to achieve. For instance, if your goal is to reduce wasted resources caused by issues like room squatting and double-booked rooms, you might look for a meeting booking system with tools which provide instant insights into which rooms are being under-utilised or over-utilised in the business environment.
If an organisation wants to ensure employees can quickly find and book rooms relevant to their requirements without having to search room by room or contacting the facilities, they might choose a meeting room tool which offers a consolidated view of the resources in the business, with the option to filter through options based on location, amenities, and seating capacity.
Step 2: Define Must-Have and Nice-to-Have Features
While many modern meeting room booking tools have overlapping capabilities, the features of each platform can vary. That’s why it’s so important for business leaders to define the essential functionality required from their platform. Some of the most important must-have features of any meeting room booking solution include:
- Online room booking grids: A simple and convenient visual interface, where teams can rapidly determine which rooms are available for use, and which have been reserved.
- Room availability: Rapid insights into the availability of meeting rooms, with clear insights into reservation times and dates.
- Filter search: The ability to search for specific meeting room solutions based on necessary resources, hardware, and meeting room size.
- Notifications: Automated notifications whenever an employee is added to a booking
- Check-in: Check-in and auto-release functions to improve room utilisation and track the usage of different environments.
- Booking permissions: Access controls to determine who should be able to book which rooms.
- Room management: A central management dashboard for coordinating schedules, amenities, and space usage
Alongside these must-have features, business leaders in certain environments may also require access to more specific capabilities. For instance, if your company hosts weekly meetings between remote and in-house marketing teams, you may benefit from tools which allow you to set up automated, recurring booking for a specific space, at a certain time. Other nice-to-have features might include:
- Interactive floor maps to allow for more intuitive bookings among team members
- Meeting approval tools to control the use of request-only rooms
- Analytics and data exports for behind-the-scenes insights into resource utilisation
- Room scheduler or room display apps for room status display and on-the-spot booking
- Auto-release features triggered by sensors, to make rooms automatically available when existing team members finish their conference or no one shows up for the meeting.
Step 3: Prioritise Visibility and Simplicity
An excellent meeting room booking system should make it easier for team members to take advantage of the spaces available to them without wasting resources. Prioritising visibility and ease of use when selecting the right software means companies can ensure they’re getting the most value out of their available resources, amenities, and spaces.
A good meeting room booking system should come with an easy-to-use dashboard, which allows users to view all bookings and rooms in one convenient space. It should allow users to filter through available rooms by location and amenities and instantly create bookings which notify all attendees involved in a meeting.
