The key to achieving efficient use of space and maximizing the return on investment for real estate decisions is effective management of meeting rooms. But, 73% of organizations lack indicators for measuring the use of meeting rooms effectively and therefore do not make effective use of meeting rooms. This article aims to clarify how to approach meeting room utilization and how to achieve the right reports to improve your organization.
The Importance of Accurate Meeting Room Usage Data
Proper data concerning meeting room occupancy is an invaluable opportunity for organizations focusing on a better work environment and investment in real estate space. Upon understanding precisely how and when meeting spaces are utilized, companies can unlock numerous benefits as mentioned below.
- Improving Productivity and Collaboration
Organizations can empower their employees to be more productive and achieve better collaboration if they make it easy to book meeting spaces in a room-based booking system and provide meeting rooms that are properly sized according to the purpose of the meeting.
- Reducing Operational Costs
Underutilized meeting rooms lead to wasted resources. Usage data helps the entities to find such inefficiencies in a system and eliminate it which in turn helps the organization to cut down the costs spent on the maintenance of such ineffective spaces which are not used.
Common Pitfalls in Measuring Meeting Room Usage
Despite the importance of accurate meeting room usage data, many organizations fall victim to common pitfalls that undermine their efforts. Here’s a range of pitfalls that you should avoid.
- Manual Tracking Methods
Spreadsheets in particular have been a leading way of manual capturing of vehicle data and are often imprecise and limited to specific information.
- Relying Solely on Booking Data
Booking data only shows a future reservation or a plan to use the room, but it does not elaborate on the actual number of guests who failed to arrive or people who left early or stayed longer than the time allocated for the meeting.
- Lack of Real-Time Data and Insights
Most traditional approaches will only give you data that reflects past events and therefore cannot give you real-time information that would help in the control of utilization of space and effective decision making.
The Right Way to Measure Meeting Room Usage
To overcome challenges associated with meeting room usage tracking and measure them accurately, organizations must embrace modern, technology-driven solutions as mentioned below.
- Automated Sensor-Based Room Monitoring Systems
Such systems rely on motion sensors, occupancy sensors, and others to automatically log room usage patterns in real time using highly reliable and hassle-free methods.
- Integration with Existing Scheduling/Calendar Systems
There are many meeting room booking systems that are in use today and all of these systems can be made to work in conjunction with each other and allow users to have accurate data on usage.
- Advanced Analytics and Reporting Tools
These tools allow companies to identify trends and efficiently present raw data in meaningful and visualized ways to support data-driven decision making.
Conclusion
A company in the modern day is unable to function without the ability to monitor its meeting rooms correctly. It’s possible to gather tremendous benefits from sensor-based monitoring systems, scheduling tools, and advanced analyses of different factors in your meeting space. These data analytic solutions help organizations to manage real estate assets efficiently and to make the right business decisions.
