Analytics to the Rescue: A Customer’s Conference Room Tale

For many companies, the perception of how their meeting and conference room space is used is vastly different from reality. The disconnect happens when managers have to rely on verbal feedback from employees to assess workspace usage, instead of having access to workplace analytics.

Do these comments sound familiar?

• I can’t find a conference room, they’re always full.
• The projector never works in that room.
• Why are two people meeting in our only big conference room? Where am I supposed to meet with my 5-person team?

How Teem Addresses Conference Room Issues

Here at Teem, we’ve been building robust workplace analytics that help our customers know whether or not these types of statements are actually true.

Whenever a company’s employees use our conference room scheduling tools or visitor management system, it generates data. We surface that data as real-time graphs and charts, plus comments and suggestions that offer context for those visuals. We call this part of our platform Insights.

One of our customers, a project manager with the manufacturing company Genysis Brand Solutions, recently shared with us a story about how meeting room data saved the day. When a popular conference room was almost torn out, Taylor was able to prove its value by turning to his company’s Insights reports in EventBoard.

Here’s his story .

Saved by the Workplace Analytics

We have 7 conference rooms at our facility. Two of them are located in the executive area and the others are spread out around our various warehouse segments.

We have 182,000 square feet of warehouse space, so getting to an open conference room sometimes means walking quite a ways. We have upwards of 300 employees spanning three shifts. Our conference rooms are sometimes in high demand, other times they sit empty. But when they get used, they really get used.

A new executive team member was recently brought on to the company. Since there was no available office space, the decision was being seriously considered to tear down/convert one of the two executive-area conference rooms into an office.

Our executive team has an assistant who schedules all their meetings, so they are understandably not always in the loop about which rooms get used and how often. But as things go, decisions get made quickly, which in this case meant our favorite ski-resort-themed conference room was headed for Hades. And not likely to ever freeze over.

Conference rooms are like your health in one sense: It’s something you don’t always appreciate until it’s gone or out of service. Being a project manager, I frequently schedule and hold meetings. I knew immediately that the loss of this room would have a very negative impact because the only other conference room within what feels like 2 miles gets taken up by the unscheduled and frequent customer and client visits.

But I needed data.

Thankfully, when we pulled up the Teem analytics it was like a green-circle-level run [at a ski resort] – it was easy to see that the room headed down the chute had the highest frequency of bookings of any of our conference rooms. When the executive team heard this, our room was given an indefinite season pass.

We were saved from conference room disaster by Teem analytics. It reminded me of Warren Miller’s sage advice: “The best thing about skiing backwards is you can see where you’ve been.” Analytics literally show you where you’ve been.