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You’ve heard of the fear of missing out (FOMO), but have you heard of fear of missing meetings (FOMM)? With many companies reopening their corporate offices, the number of in-person and hybrid meetings continues to steadily increase. So it makes sense that your workforce wants to start collaborating together from your conference rooms.
It’s a new age for work — and that means it’s probably time to upgrade the in-person experience to align with new company goals and propel employee productivity.
Conference room booking may have been in hibernation since March 2020, but the draw of the physical workplace may just push your conference room demand higher than pre-pandemic rates. We have a lot of lost meeting time to make up for and in the time that’s passed, a lot has changed.
Here’s how to make managing conference room booking better to help get employees prepared for in-person collaboration once again.
As far as workplace experts can tell, the office is not going to snap back to pre-pandemic normalcy. We know that some people remain hesitant about returning to the office and most plan to work from home a couple days a week. Of course, humans are social creatures and face-to-face interaction will always fuel creativity and connection.
That being said, conference rooms won’t be used in the exact same way they were prior to the pandemic. When your employees do come into the office, they’ll be doing so for a chance to have conversations with their colleagues and they’re really looking forward to enjoying the more human aspects of work.
Nothing gets in the way of employee productivity quite like slow, inefficient technology. And now that your workforce is gearing up for their return to the office, human resources professionals and other workplace leaders should start equipping the workplace with conference room booking software to make the transition back to the office seamless for everyone.
As the majority of employees learned to work from home, we got used to living radically more digital lives. For months now, people have gotten used to virtual meetings and have become reliant on technology for scheduling and enabling our meetings.
Returning employees want a similar experience. Conference room booking software addresses this need by giving them the ability to search for available space, reserve a room that meets their criteria, and find important details such as conference room capacity, equipment, and location.
For many in leadership roles, the challenge will be discerning the difference between needing more conference room space, needing different types of conference room space, and needing better conference room space.
Failure to prepare is preparing to fail, as the saying goes. You can’t sit passively to make the decisions about your office space and technology. Not only are there many moving parts to manage right now, but you’re also grappling with how to forecast trends and get your workplace ready for tomorrow.
Forward-thinking leaders can’t wait around for all the answers to magically appear — but you can get the next best thing: Insightful information from your conference room booking software. And the right conference room booking systems mean deliver it to you with ease.
Remember the days of getting all dressed up for work? Dress-code requirements are much more lax in the age of online meetings, anything that can’t be seen on-screen can be all about comfort. PJs and sweats are a modern staple when working remotely.
They’ve also had more location options. For extra peace and quiet, an employee might have logged on from their home office or opted to work from their walk-in closet. For meetings they needed to attend but didn’t have to participate in, they could easily switch off their camera and microphone as they listened and enjoyed their lunch. Towards the end of the day, it was even possible to work from bed or their couch — anywhere their laptop could go, they could work.
And pandemic-era flexibility is something employees want to maintain after company buildings reopen.
An engaged workforce starts with more processes that are more convenient, technology that’s actually user-friendly, and time-saving solutions that make their lives better.
It’s not enough to avoid disengagement in your conference rooms. The real value of investing in conference room booking systems is the facilitation of an actively engaged workforce. When your technology makes finding, reserving, and managing conference room booking a breeze, there’s more time and energy available to focus on the success of the organization.
With a great conference room booking tool, employees feel more comfortable because they can navigate the office with a greater sense of agency. It’s combines the best of work-from-home and office-based arrangements, so employees see the benefits of having both greater flexibility and more opportunities for interaction.
Don’t expect poor etiquette or bad manners to work themselves out. Being tardy for a meeting can throw off productivity and have a domino effect on your conference room schedule, pushing each meeting back to make up for a late start.
Even if you haven’t reconfigured your offices and everything is in the same place, it’s been over a year since employees have seen it. Their memory of the space may be a little rusty, so having a handy way to make their way to their next meeting will help ensure they get there on time.
Coming on-site will give people more chances to interact, socialize, and build that in-person connection with members of their team. But if you can’t predict who is using your conference rooms and on what days on-site meetings will be held, things become pretty complex.
Fear not: Conference room booking software can help you get a more predictable schedule and calculate your true conference room utilization so it’s easier to support your workforce and the work environment. (You can read more about that here.)
What happens when there’s recurring meetings get scheduled in a conference room that no one attends? We call that a ghost meeting because the wasted space can come back to haunt you. Most of the time they’re caused by human forgetfulness — someone probably cancelled the meeting last minute but forgot to delete their room reservation, making it look like the room was being used when it wasn’t.
The only thing worse are zombie meetings: Recurring room reservations that aren’t attended. Week after week, the room appears to be in use and shows up as unavailable. For employees looking for a meeting space, this type of event can be incredibly frustrating. For your business, there’s significant costs associated with wasted space.
Fortunately, there’s a way to prevent ghost, no-show, and zombie meetings. With conference room booking software like ours, you can adjust your meeting settings to require hosts to check into their meetings within a designated period of time. Then, the failure to do so would automatically cancel their reservation and free up the room for others to use.
Teem also has the Zombie HunterⓇ feature, which actively monitors recurring meetings. If it finds a recurring meeting that hasn’t been attended after a set number of occurrences, it’ll first email the host about the reservation. If it happens again, the offending meeting will be removed from the schedule.
Great conference rooms aren’t magical — they’re planned.
Great decision-making skills aren’t a matter of just having a data set to review. You need accurate information in a digestable way, so you can avoid trouble-shooting and toggling back and forth between different sources to compare information. In other words, conference room booking solutions help you work smarter, not harder.
Maximum employee productivity goes hand-in-hand with having the right types of conference rooms. Teem can help you improve both. Find out more about the impact conference room software can have on your bottom-line.
News, tips, and product updates.
Subscribe to Teem’s blog today.