Best Practices for Conference Room Booking From Smart Companies

Once you’ve successfully implemented conference room booking software, you probably have a few pressing questions:

• How can we improve software adoption rates among employees?
• How can we improve the conference room booking process?
• How can we prevent some rooms from being underused and other rooms from being overused?
• How can we make meetings more fun?

As a provider of conference room booking solutions for companies around the world, we’ve discovered plenty of lesser known tips and tricks—and we’re happy to share. Here are a few of our favorites.

Conference Room Booking Best Practices From Top Companies

Look at the Bigger Picture

Teem tracks workplace analytics such as space utilization, visitor management data and meeting statistics to help you make the most of every meeting room.

Our software provides actionable, intelligent office recommendations based on your company’s own data in your dashboard. Teem’s web-based admin dashboard allows you to centrally manage all of your organization’s Teem users, lobby kiosks and conference room displays across different floors, buildings and even campuses.

You can also centrally adjust settings, turn on specific features from your dashboard and then apply those choices to hundreds or even thousands of devices. From your dashboard, you can track logs and alerts, sync your company directory, control and manage access and control integrations seamlessly.

Teem’s software can help you uncover trends, too.

Use Actions to Yield Insights

Teem reveals patterns and trends in your workplace based on space usage, so when your employees use Teem’s scheduling software to book rooms, they’re actually providing valuable feedback about how to better manage your office space based on their needs.

With workplace analytics, you can see:

• Room utilization rates, which help you make smarter decisions about your space
• Meeting cancellations, which reveal inefficiencies and can help you reclaim spaces from cancelled meetings
• Room recapture rates, which show how often meeting rooms are “reclaimed” from meetings ending early or reservations being cancelled
• Meeting duration, which can help you plan based on the way your workforce uses their time
• Meeting scheduling logs, which show how far in advance meeting invitations are sent, revealing more about the meeting habits of your workforce

You can use this valuable workplace data to optimize your space.

For example, if you notice that certain rooms are preferred over others, you can reach out to frequent meeting schedulers and attendees to better understand why. Perhaps one meeting room has a whiteboard and is used more for brainstorming sessions, but another has a large screen TV that’s ideal for presentations and video conferencing. Depending on demand, you might want to consider upgrading equipment or changing your meeting room layout.

Turn Insights into Action

Using information from Workplace Analytics, you can update company policies to actually improve meeting habits and change your organization’s culture. Start by leading by example. A quick introduction to Teem’s room booking system and periodic emails with quick tips on using Teem will improve the overall adoption rate and experience.

Another way to improve adoption is to identify the “super users” in your organization. They can help advocate on your behalf or get buy-in from others. It’s a good idea to check in with them regularly as they can help train others, which could boost adoption rate and overall satisfaction. They could also guide your decision-making process before making any settings changes or ahead of any planned upgrades.

Teem’s Workplace Analytics help you track meeting trends in your organization. You can see typical meeting size, duration, and actual utilization of meeting spaces. This actionable data also includes recommendations specific to each organization on how to support more collaboration within your existing facilities or how to better plan for new facilities.

Use Beacons Or Sensors To Track Real-Time Room Utilization

We recognize there can be a discrepancy between what’s on the books and real life. That’s why Teem has sensor integrations that allow you to gather valuable, real-time data about how spaces are actually being used.

Sensors can automatically book a meeting room or huddle space when it is occupied, and the space’s status is reflected on calendars, EventBoard, Flightboard and Teem Maps, allowing anyone to easily see what space is available, where and when.

Without interrupting an employee’s workflow, beacons or sensors will automatically:

• Book spaces as they become occupied
• Show the current status of open and in-use spaces on calendars and other Teem tools
• Remove meetings from the calendar that end early, freeing up meeting spaces that can then be used by others
• Cancel no-show meetings if no one shows up to a scheduled event
• Integrate sensor data with Teem Insights to provide reports filled with actionable analytics on space utilization and meeting behavior
• Check people into meetings when they show up for their scheduled meetings

Employees don’t even need to check in, cancel or update changes to their reservations on a calendar or EventBoard room display. Sensors do it all for them so they can focus on the most pressing task at hand.

Sensors tackle another persistent and daunting employee problem: zombie meetings. These are recurring meetings on employees’ calendars that are no longer needed because a project ended, the meeting was rescheduled or an employee is no longer with the company. The involved parties know to ignore the pop-up reminder, but the problem is the rooms don’t.

Zombie meetings remain on a conference room booking schedule for as long as the recurring series was set up to last, which could be years. That means room displays say they are occupied, preventing someone else from reserving the space and at time they need. That could cause employees to postpone meetings unnecessarily or cause undue stress if no other rooms with the needed equipment are available.

Administrators have the ability to avoid zombie meetings by setting up preferences in the dashboard. Teem’s software monitors your company’s recurring meetings for which attendees are failing to check in on the EventBoard room display. After meeting participants fail to check in for a specified number of consecutive occurrences, Teems removes the room from the recurring meeting series, freeing up the meeting room for the rest of the organization.

Make Meeting Spaces Memorable

Your office space says a lot about your company as a whole, especially its culture and brand. That’s why we love to see companies injecting a dose of personality into their meeting rooms. You can accomplish this with an accent wall, decal or other visual cue. Depending on how many meeting spaces you have, you could also name your conference rooms after cardinal directions, geography, famous streets or notable landmarks, such as Monument Valley or Golden Gate.

When we named our conference rooms, we sought employee feedback and solicited suggestions using locations within movies or TV shows. (Think: The Death Star, Fire Swamp, Winterfell, etc.) The process was collaborative, highlighting the very point and need for meetings. Our naming convention makes it difficult to dread a meeting in the Banana Stand.

Bonus Best Practice: Brainstorm with Teem

If you’re reaching a plateau, reach out to Teem. We’re on a mission to make our conference room booking tools more accessible for everyone, but we need your help.

So please, reach out to your Account Executive if you need to troubleshoot or talk it through. There’s always ways for us to improve, too. Improving the experience of conference room booking can help make meetings less painful and more productive for everyone. And that’s something worth celebrating.