The Hunt for Vacant Rooms at the Office: An easily-fixed drag on employee productivity

iCrowd Newswire
06 Aug 2022, 00:02 GMT+10

As your team arrives at a meeting place, they're struck by the fact that there are no meeting rooms available. They search across the floor, then move to the next floor, and there's a vacant room - finally! But this one can only seat four participants...only half the team. Apparently, the spreadsheet-based room scheduling software tool messed up. After hunting around for more than 45-minutes, the team calls it quits - and reschedules the session for another date.

More Than Just Wasted Effort

How often have professionals confronted similar situations? Consider the above scenario: Even assuming the 8-person team spent one hour hunting for office space - that's eight person-hours of potentially productive time wasted. An entire day's worth of productivity squandered because of a manually-operated spreadsheet. Clearly, even in this hypothetical case, there would be more time wasted than just an hour per employee:

- Travel time from/to the home base and meeting venues

- Searching for parking

- Signing-in and validating their arrival

A full-featured room scheduler software, with intelligent functionality and advanced scheduling and communication capabilities, could have reclaimed much of those lost hours. However, wasted time is just one factor of the equation. The unsuccessful hunt for working space results in more than unproductive time:

- The team might postpone making critical decisions, scheduled for discussion at the now rescheduled session

- Presentation decks, statistics, briefing papers, and other meeting materials become "stale". Team members must now review and revise them for the next session

- There's added communication and coordination required to ensure the new date, time, and venue, fits into every participant's schedule - a nightmare task for most meeting organizers!

While these fallouts, due to not using a feature-rich room scheduling software, do mean spending additional - often avoidable - time; it also means additional frustration, stress, and non-productive cycles. When you add the cost of those unproductive cycles, the true cost of the hunt for vacant workspace is more than just the hourly rate of an employee.

Bringing Efficiency into Room Scheduling

For organizations that implement a shared workspace regimen, it doesn't make sense to rely on paper booking processes, or manually-updated spreadsheet scheduling tools. That's because those "systems" lack integration with other corporate systems, such as email software, employee calendars, and core org-wide network infrastructure. Today's integrated room scheduler software solutions do more than just document a room booking. They also:

- Track office facility and equipment

- Check room current usage and duration

- Monitor team members' facility reservations

- Generate detailed reports for accurate audit and internal record assurance

Another unique feature of high-end enterprise scheduling systems, is that they are mobile-enabled. So, how does that help with the hunt for vacant office space? Well, in the hypothetical scenario highlighted earlier, consider how mobile-enabled room scheduling software could have saved several hours of employee time.

The minute the meeting host discovered that there's a problem with meeting space, he/she could send out electronic updates - instantly! - to all participants about change in plans. Participants, who had not yet left their homes/offices to head to the meeting venue, would immediately reschedule their own day, and used that time more productively. Can a paper or spreadsheet-based scheduler match that? No way!

Tags: room scheduling software, Room Scheduling, online room scheduling, desk management app, hot desk software