Room availability, time spent, internet connection, infrastructure … Many issues need to be taken into account to manage meeting spaces and to optimize their use. Find out what these issues are, as well as how our SMATI space management solution can solve them.
A manager spends about 3 hours a day in meetings. On a life time career of 40 years, it means that about 16 years are dedicated to team meetings … In order for this time to be used effectively, one of the main issues is to efficiently managing the meeting spaces made available to employees.
Meeting rooms management : a recurring company issue
Room unavailability, unattractive or even unsuitable environment (temperature, brightness, furniture, internet connection, multimedia equipment …), “ghost meetings” (room reserved but which isn’t used by anybody), here are many common issues that companies must solve to ensure the employees comfort and productivity.
Businesses must reconcile two major issues in the management of their meeting rooms. On the one hand, they must have an infrastructure that meets their employees’ needs, knowing that these needs change according to the company size, the nature of teams, potential office redevelopment projects and new working methods. . When the vast majority of employees worked in closed offices, those would be used as breakout rooms. The generalization of openspace has given birth to a need in small spaces that allows two or three employees to exchange spontaneously (visually or remotely) without disturbing their neighborhood. Another example: the increasing adoption of videoconferencing to facilitate the collaboration of multi-site teams requires a specific and costly infrastructure.
The second challenge for the property management department (and which is often the most strategic one because of its significant economic impact) is to increase the office overall occupancy rate, and shared spaces in particular in order to make the real estate assets profitable. The difficulty often encountered by these departments on this subject is their lack of knowledge about the actual use of meeting rooms and thus by how much the shared spaces utilisation could potentially be improved.
Meeting rooms : a complete infrastructure which should address employees’ needs
First essential point to enable optimized meeting room management : the availability and easy to use meeting rooms booking system. While the meeting rooms offering in terms of quantity and size is often complex to evolve due to refurbishment constraints, the adoption of a simple and transparent room booking system undoubtedly enhances the meeting rooms usage. And the booking system automatic update according to the actual use of the room at the scheduled time, is an additional asset to maximize their utilization.
The equipment provided must be usable and controllable by all standard terminals. Everyone can come with his equipment, the employee leads the meeting easily as he works on his personal computer. Similarly, it is more efficient to use wifi, a reliable and sufficient connection, to share content and communicate with the rest of the team.
The rooms’ comfort (be it the temperature, luminosity, air quality or furniture) is also a factor which is too often neglected and which has a significant impact on the employee well-being and productivity. Studies have shown that the people’s concentration can drop by about 30% if the level of carbon dioxide in the room is too high, hence the importance of good ventilation in these rooms.
The SMATI solution enables an optimal meeting rooms management
The SMATI Solution from Hxperience provides a solution to the various challenges of efficient meeting rooms management.
If the choice of data to be measured and analyzed shall differ according to the objectives which the different stakeholders (owners, managers, occupants) are pursuing, SMATI proposes a set of functionalities which are essential to the good management of meeting rooms:
- A detailed and multifactorial analysis of room attendance
- The automatic update of your existing booking system based on actual occupancy
- Visualisation of the meeting room status (empty, booked) with a light strip
- The visualization by the employees of the rooms availability and the possibility of extending a room booking by simply pressing a key
- Analysis of environment and comfort indicators in rooms
If you would like to know more about the SMATI solution for shared spaces, please contact our expert team.