Deciding to automate meeting room management could be one of the best things you do this year. We all know meetings are crucial in virtually any industry. Around 83 percent of employees spend around a third of their week in meetings.
Unfortunately, more often than not, people can’t simply walk into a room and immediately dive into a meeting. Countless employees waste significant time searching for suitable meeting spaces, setting up the technology, and connecting devices. All of this leads to a severe dip in productivity.
In addition, business leaders and IT teams need to spend time constantly updating and configuring meeting spaces manually, which prevents them from focusing on other, more valuable tasks.
That’s where meeting room management automation comes in. Here’s your guide to upgrading productivity and efficiency, boosting employee engagement, and reducing costs with automation.
Why Automate Meeting Room Management?
Automation has become a valuable tool in the modern workplace. Companies in every industry are investing in automation to help them streamline customer service, improve employee productivity, and even reduce operational costs. One study even found that 30 percent of companies investing in automation use their tools to increase profits.
Since effective meetings are crucial to the success of the hybrid workplace, finding ways to automate meeting room management, configuration, and allocation can be highly beneficial. The right technology can:
- Enhance productivity and efficiency: With meeting room automation, employees and technicians can spend less time configuring meeting rooms and more time engaging in valuable tasks and conversations. The result is a more productive team, efficient workflows, and better meeting outcomes.
- Improve employee experiences: Today’s employees don’t want to waste valuable time searching for meeting rooms and setting up tech. They want to dive straight into engaging conversations with their colleagues. Automated solutions eliminate the delays and disruptions that lead to longer, more frustrating meeting experiences.
- Save money: Automated systems can help companies save money in various ways. You can automatically configure and update hardware, reducing the need to pay technicians. There’s even the option to automatically switch devices off when they’re not in use, reducing energy costs and your company’s carbon footprint.
In some cases, automating meeting room management can also improve your organisation’s security and compliance.
By setting policies for how meeting rooms can be used, implementing automated patches and updates for software, and more, you can reduce your exposure to various risks.
How to Automate Meeting Room Management: Step-by-Step
The good news for companies in today’s world is that there are numerous ways to automate and enhance their meeting room management strategy. Countless companies now offer software solutions, as well as intelligent hardware, that can enhance the room management experience.
Here’s your step-by-step guide to getting started.
Step 1: Determine Your Needs, Policies, and Processes
You'll need a strategy before experimenting with solutions that help you automate meeting room management. Start by looking at your office space carefully.
What kind of meeting rooms are available for your teams? Do you have large conference room spaces for all-hands meetings and training sessions? Do you empower employees to turn any space into a meeting room with plug-and-play tech? Maybe you want to create various zones for different types of employees, with focus rooms and specific amenities or hardware.
What software and hardware are available in each meeting space? Your meeting room management technology will need to integrate with everything from your collaboration software (like Microsoft Teams) to your video bars and audio systems.
Next, consider how you’ll encourage your employees to use each meeting space. Will you have different room booking policies for each type of room? For instance, maybe you only want your senior executives to book larger conference rooms, or perhaps you want to limit the use of any focus room to one or two hours.
Outlining your meeting room policies in advance will ensure you can configure the automation software effectively and communicate expectations to your employees.
Step 2: Invest in Meeting Room Management Software
Now that you have your policies and a clear view of your meeting room strategy, you can invest in software to help you organise and automate the meeting experience. There are plenty of excellent solutions out there. For instance, you could use a comprehensive “workplace management” platform, making tracking all your meeting spaces, hardware, and employees easy.
Or you can invest in a solution specifically designed for specific meeting room environments. For instance, you might choose a management tool specially designed for Microsoft Teams Rooms.
Your solution should give you a single control point for everything from in-room device activation to remote configuration and access control management. Your ideal platform should also give you the tools you need to:
- Generate reports and data: Insights into how employees use your meeting rooms will help you to optimise and improve your policies over time. They’ll also ensure you can make intelligent decisions about which software, hardware, and office design strategies to invest in.
- Create meeting room policies: The right software should allow you to implement the policies you’ve already designed for room usage. You should be able to automate things like asking employees to check in and out of meetings or controlling access.
- Integrate all your technology: As mentioned above, your meeting room management tech should also integrate with all the hardware and software you already use, such as team calendars, collaboration tools, workforce management apps, and meeting room devices.
Step 3: Leverage Remote Device Management Software
Some meeting room management solutions will come with endpoint or device management tools already included. For instance, Logitech Sync is a cloud-based remote device management solution that allows IT administrators to maintain, update, and manage devices from any environment.
This solution can even integrate with other room management solutions, like Microsoft Teams Rooms or Zoom Rooms, for a centralised approach to room automation. If you don’t have access to device management tools within your meeting room management solutions, you'll need to integrate an external, third-party solution.
This will ensure you can automate processes like updating and configuring device firmware and software when patches are released. It can also allow you to automate things like device activation and set-up when employees access a meeting room.
