A meeting room is simply a place to hold meetings. It’s simple. Meeting rooms can also hold training sessions, client meetings, brainstorming, and/or strategy sessions.

A statistics from BOOQED says, “Time spent in meetings has been rising by 8% to 10% annually since 2000. However, 40% of workers waste up to 30 minutes just searching for a collaborative space for meetings.” With the number of times businesses kill scheduling meetings, they could take Friday afternoon off every week. According to OWLLABS, “Almost half a trillion dollars are wasted because of meeting room booking inefficiency.” Here is the formula to calculate the loss – 

Time Wasted Cost = [Number Minutes Wasted / 60] X [Occurrences] * [Sum of Attendees’ Hourly Rate]

Meeting Room Booking Challenges

Meeting room booking distress affects businesses of all sizes, from small businesses to large enterprises. But the more meeting facilities a company has, the more complex planning and scheduling meetings become. Some consequences include – 

1. Time Waste
2. Scheduling Mistakes
3. Damage to Employee Morale and Client Perception
4. Inefficient Use of Meeting Rooms and Resources
5. Favoritism/Discretion To Specific Groups Of People
6. Hogging Meeting Room By Extended Bookings
7. Single Person Dependency

Time Waste

Scheduling Errors

A complicated and multi-step meeting room booking system completes the following tasks: 

Scheduling errors generally occur because information concerning space availability isn’t always valid or accessible at a moment’s notice due to a lack of synchronization among different systems. Besides, modifications or cancellations can’t get notified immediately to meeting attendees and associates because of the absence of enough channels. As a result, 

• Double booked meeting rooms, 
• Attendees showing up to canceled meetings,
• Catering is being delivered at the wrong time or to the wrong meeting room.

Employee Morale Loss and Damaged Client Perception 

EVRM is a cohesive, centralized cloud-based system that provides a quick overview of meetings, meeting rooms, and attendees, along with meeting room booking features. Therefore, like in the old days, meeting organizers don’t have to rely on their memory to keep track of meetings. This memorizing practice leads to vital mistakes and creates doubt and frustration among staff and visitors alike. Not to mention, visitors will be left with a poor impression of your company if meetings are not organized enough, which includes issues like –

• Not beginning on time, 
• Meeting rooms aren’t available at the decided time slot, 
• Attendees are not showing up punctually. 

These can hurt businesses’ capability to administer essential projects on track and win new clients. At the end of the day, the company’s productivity will decrease along with their employee satisfaction.

Inefficient Use of Meeting Rooms and Resources

A meeting room might sound a bit less critical, but it is a valuable resource. Monitoring and analyzing meeting rooms and resource usage will lead to efficiency as well as controlled real estate costs and energy bills. For example, heating or cooling empty meeting rooms that aren’t in use or hosting meetings for five people where the maximum capacity is 50 people. Digital meeting room booking systems can solve the issue and help you book the meeting room your team requires.

Favoritism/Discretion To Specific Groups Of People

Whether there’s politics in an organization or not, there will be an implicit agreement between teams to scratch each other’s back or protect their turf. Hence, specific groups or individuals will get meeting rooms after requesting, while others will be denied. An analog meeting room system enables meeting requests from undesirable members to be put on hold while desirable members or any other members’ demands are readily accepted. These happen primarily in the manual meeting room booking system because of the visible lack of rules and policies on usage. Also, nobody cares. Therefore, discretion is left to the people who think they own the rooms. As a result, it has become one of the greatest frustrations resulting in inadequate blood across the organization.

Hogging Meeting Room By Extended Bookings

Hogging meeting rooms are another example of a lousy office political culture. It is common in a large organization where politics is part of the culture. Meeting rooms on particular floors are booked because the people on that floor want to utilize the meeting room for their purposes only and no other staff are welcome there. If this ends in reserving the meeting room for a whole year, then not finding meeting rooms when needed is normal.

Single Person Dependency

Conclusion

It is time for us to shift from an analog meeting room booking system to a digital one. A Digital meeting room booking system can not only help us to organize our meetings but also increase the efficiency of meetings, employees and offices. EVRM is a cloud-based SaaS that helps businesses with their meeting room booking as well as visitor and employee sign-in management. 

In fine, ask yourself, whether your meeting room booking system helps you achieve during and after discussion goals or not. Can an analog meeting room booking system or EVRM save you a lot of time and money in the long run?