What Are Meeting Room Analytics?

When handling office and meeting spaces, and related resources (catering, parking, etc.), it’s a mistake to overlook meeting room analytics, as they can help your organization better understand and optimize its workforce and workplace dynamics.

Are meeting rooms being used frequently enough to cover unnecessary expenses?

How much resource waste is happening?

Are some teams using spaces more than others?

Analytics software can define business success, outlining critical ways to improve productivity and resource optimization. A must-have for modern businesses, below we look at what meeting room analytics are, how they can work, and why it’s worth investing in an analytics solution.

Key Metrics to Track in Meeting Room Analytics 

Meeting room analytics leverages advanced tools like meeting room booking systems integrated with calendaring tools, sensors, and workspace reporting software to collect and analyze data about the utilization of the meeting and work spaces in an office.

The goal of meeting room analytics is to provide valuable insights to drive smart decision making for things such as what workspace design changes may be needed, where to adjust resource ordering and usage, and how to eliminate waste in the office.

Key metrics to track include:

1. Room occupancy vs capacity
2. Bookings by team
3. Frequency of bookings
4. Cancellations
5. Peak usage hours
6. Room and workspace preferences
7. Utilization trends for both workspaces and resources

The goal with meeting room analytics is to enable businesses to drive more efficiencies and align workspaces and resources to employee needs.

Why Your Business Needs Meeting Room Analytics

Hybrid work models and flexible schedules have become the norm for many businesses. The efficient use of office space is crucial to this model, where an organization may have a smaller space than before and depend upon amiable coworking and shared workspaces.

Data drives smart decisions. Double bookings or unavailable meeting spaces can disrupt workflows and create friction with employees. Cancelled meetings and spaces that go empty because nobody knows they’re now available are lost money. Beyond that, meeting room analytics offer data-driven insights necessary to optimize conference rooms, streamline scheduling for flexible employees, and support growth and productivity long-term.

Top advantages to using meeting room analytics

• Maximize office space effectively to avoid empty rooms and overbooking
• Repurpose underutilized spaces to provide more community zones or additional conference spaces
• Integrates with meeting room software to deliver real-time room availability updates to employees, making it easier to find, book, and use workspaces at any time
• Save money by downsizing or repurposing underused spaces and eliminate wasteful resource usage habits

How Meeting Analytics Solutions Work

Solutions like our workplace analytics software are powerful tools to help businesses of any size understand how meeting spaces are used and how to make changes that boost productivity and help the organization be more efficient.

Meeting room analytics are most effective when integrated with smart workspace booking solutions like Resource Central. This makes the meeting room analytics process more seamless and highly efficient, ensuring real-time data and updates are translating to employee calendars and operational trackers.

1. Collect and track real-time room usage

The first step in the meeting room analytics process is collecting data about the entire office’s spaces. This includes collecting data from occupancy sensors, digital signage, calendars, and smart meeting room booking solutions.

2. Centralize meeting room and workspace bookings and employee schedules

Employees should be able to check near-real-time availability of rooms, and businesses should be able to avoid the cost of double bookings. Having a smart room booking solution integrated with both your analytics solution and existing tools like Outlook and Microsoft Teams (like Add-On Products’ solutions are), streamlines the scheduling and booking process. It also expedites turnover, room cleanings, and helps to minimize last-minute cancellations and define clear usage history logs for trend analysis.

3. Analyze room and resource utilization trends

Workplace analytics does the work for you, processing all captured data to identify trends, patterns, and actionable insights you can take back to the board. This can include:

• How many workspaces are booked per day on average
• Which departments are using workspaces the most
• Which rooms are booked most often and during what time frames
• Gaps between room capacity and attendance
• Cancellations
• Turnover times and underutilized spaces
• Resource usage to ensure catering, parking, tech support, and other needed services and tools are used effectively (versus being ordered and then left unused)

Tip: Read this article next for how to unlock efficiency with workspace data!

4. Review and share reports to answer key stakeholder questions

Workspace analytics offers intuitive visuals and reporting features that make it easier to answer stakeholder questions, empower management to make updates, and execute routine reporting.  

By systematically tracking occupancy rates, usage patterns, and space availability, companies can identify underutilized rooms and opportunities for reconfiguration. Workspace utilization analytics are an important part of good workplace management, and leaving this data in the dark could be losing you savings. Learn more about how to understand room utilization analytics >

Best Conference Room Analytics Tools

The best meeting room analytics solutions are easy to use, integrate with your company’s existing tech infrastructure, and provide ongoing insights that benefit the operation at large. Add-On Products’ customizable Insights workplace analysis solution uses business intelligence dashboards built with Microsoft Power BI to deliver insights and reporting based on your live data gathered from our booking solutions, fully integrated in Microsoft 365 and Outlook®.

Get more information about Insights workplace analytics software and how it can help you improve workplace experiences, allocate space efficiently, implement flexible seating, and streamline resource usage.