Whether you’re managing a hybrid workplace or your employees are in the office full time, it’s vital that your workforce has access to the resources they need. This is most challenging with shared resources that aren’t assigned to anyone in particular, like conference rooms.
Conference rooms are some of your best spaces for facilitating collaboration, but they’re also often in high demand. Even if you have enough meeting spaces on paper, the number of groups who need to use them can vary widely from day to day, making them difficult to efficiently manage.
Many traditional conference room management solutions haven’t adapted to the dynamics of the modern office, creating accessibility issues and inefficiencies. The tools you use to manage meeting rooms should make the process feel simple and accessible, so employees can always tell what’s available and get what they need.
Here are seven capabilities you need to manage your conference rooms effectively.
1. Reopen availability after no-shows
It happens too often: someone reserves a meeting room, making it unavailable to everyone else, and then doesn’t show up at their scheduled time. Maybe the meeting was canceled verbally, but the host didn’t cancel it in the system. Or perhaps simply no one came. Either way, that’s space another group could be using—if they knew it was now available.
Most conference room management solutions aren’t sophisticated enough to react to “no-show” cancellations, but this capability can reclaim hours of unused time in meeting rooms each month.
For your office reservation system to respond to missed meetings, you need at least one of two things:
- Occupancy sensors like blurred vision cameras or LiDaR strips that can detect when there are no bodies in the meeting room
- A check-in system in the room itself that requires the host to indicate when they’ve arrived
Additionally, you need conference room management software that lets you incorporate this information and set parameters for “canceling” a scheduled meeting with no attendees. Tango Reserve can use either method, and you control how much time can pass before an empty conference room becomes automatically available.
2. Prevent double bookings
At some point, most office workers have had the uncomfortable experience of showing up for a scheduled meeting only to find another group using the conference room they reserved. Or worse: two groups show up at the same time, each having reserved the space like they were supposed to. Either way, tensions rise, and one group is left scrambling to find another room, meeting in a hallway, or rescheduling.
Double bookings are a frustratingly common occurrence in tools that should be designed to prevent this exact issue. When selecting a conference room management solution, make sure it can recognize double bookings and stop them before they happen.
3. Integrate reservations with employee calendar apps
People schedule meetings in their calendars. So they should be able to reserve the conference room they need from their calendars, too. Adding a room to a meeting invite should be as easy as adding a person.
The office booking solution you select shouldn’t require everyone to learn a new system or start using a new app—it should integrate with the tools and processes you already use, like Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, or Apple Calendar.
4. Establish custom permission settings
If company policy says that a conference room can only be used by certain departments or groups of a particular size, your management system shouldn’t allow it to be booked for any other purposes. You want to configure your software to fit your policies, not the other way around.
A related, but more advanced capability: depending on your scale and policies, you may want to allow employees to reserve rooms in multiple offices. Perhaps an employee travels regularly for work, and they need to reserve conference rooms at various locations during these trips. Can you configure your permission settings to accommodate them?
5. Provide room asset lists and filters
Employees shouldn’t have to physically be in a conference room to know if it has the equipment and amenities they need for their meeting. When someone is choosing a meeting room, they should be able to filter the available rooms by criteria like capacity, types of displays, whether it has audio equipment, or the type of space it is. If your software can’t handle that, people will either:
- Only use conference rooms they’re familiar with
- Reserve rooms that may not meet their needs
In both cases, your conference rooms aren’t being used effectively, and employees will experience more friction when trying to schedule meetings.
6. Add locations outside your organization
As organizations have embraced hybrid and remote work, coworking spaces and other external locations have become far more popular. And while these may not be spaces you own, your employees need convenient access to them.
For example, suppose a handful of employees need to meet in person, but your nearest office is three hours away. However, there’s a flexible office space 30 minutes from where they live. When your office booking software can incorporate third party locations, your employees have an easier time finding the most convenient space that suits their needs.
6. Help employees and guests find unfamiliar rooms
In larger offices and multi-building locations, it can take employees a while to learn their way around. Even with excellent signage, people will sometimes struggle to navigate unfamiliar spaces—and there won’t always be someone else around to help them. This is where automatic wayfinding comes into play.
Employees use map apps to navigate cities all the time, and with the right conference room management system, their phones can also provide dynamic, real-time directions to any space in your office.
7. Analyze your conference room usage
Quality occupancy analytics enable employers to understand how workers use office space throughout the week, creating opportunities to reduce costs and improve efficiency. For many organizations, conference room reservations are one of the most intuitive space utilization metrics, showing which meeting rooms are most in demand, when they’re in demand, and which ones spend too much time sitting empty. Using this information, you can replicate your best rooms, repurpose your least popular ones, or redirect employees to alternative rooms or times.
Meeting rooms are just one of the types of space you manage, but if you want to make the most of your office space, you need a conference room management software that provides visibility into how and when this space gets used.
Manage your conference rooms with Tango
Tango Reserve is a comprehensive office booking software that was purpose built for the modern office. To help your organization use your conference rooms efficiently and effectively, Tango Reserve offers best-in-class capabilities including:
- No-show cancellations
- Double booking prevention
- Calendar app integration
- Configurable permissions
- Advanced filters
- Office wayfinding
- Occupancy analytics
- And more
Want to see what Tango Reserve can do for you?
