Sustainability Advice: Go Green With Meeting Room Management

Because of growing concerns about environmental sustainability, going green has become a top priority for many individuals and companies. While sitting in an office, it may be difficult to visualize how activities in the workplace impact the environment. However, the decisions we make at work on a daily basis can contribute to major environmental problems like global warming, deforestation, and pollution.

Your company’s carbon footprint is the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that your operations produce. One area where many companies can reduce their carbon footprint is meeting room management. Organizations that rely on antiquated booking processes often don’t use their meeting rooms and other resources as efficiently as they could. For example, meeting rooms may be left empty, or unwanted services like catering may be delivered by mistake as a result of last-minute meeting cancellations.

Meeting room booking software manages meeting rooms and resources in the most efficient way possible. It streamlines all aspects of the scheduling process, from locating meeting rooms to ordering equipment and associated services. Using meeting room booking software can lower your company’s carbon emissions by helping to reduce electricity use and heating/cooling energy use through space optimization.

Boost Your Bottom Line

Avoiding empty meeting rooms reduces your carbon outlet and electricity cost.
Going green with meeting room management isn’t just good for the environment – it’s also good for your corporate image and bottom line. Increasingly, customers look to do business with companies that have strong environmental policies and small carbon footprints. Furthermore, as large corporations make an effort to reduce their carbon emissions, they often require their suppliers to do the same.

Demonstrating progress on reducing carbon emissions may give your company a competitive edge in the market. Reducing your company’s carbon footprint through efficient meeting room management can also save you money by lowering electricity costs, preventing unwanted services from being ordered, and potentially reducing real estate costs.

Optimize Space

Meeting scheduling software helps you determine which rooms and workspaces are over- or underutilized, so you can improve meeting room usage. You may even determine that you could convert some of your existing meeting rooms into office space so that there are fewer empty meeting rooms at any given time.

Go green with meeting room management

Meeting room management systems allow for hot desk booking and hoteling, so employees can share workspace and book temporary office space on an as-needed basis. Hot desking and hoteling reduce the size of offices by maximizing the number of people who use the same workstations. With Add-On Products’ Resource Central, users are able to search for and book available hot desks by category and location directly through Microsoft Outlook®. In addition to making it easier for employees to work flexibly, hot-desking and hoteling optimize space, reduce real estate costs, and lower energy consumption by employing more people in the same space.

Meeting room booking software prevents double bookings by eliminating outdated, paper-based room reservation policies. Double bookings often create chaos, requiring users to find another meeting room at the last minute. With meeting planning software, users can quickly identify which meeting rooms are in use or empty. Users can also ensure that heating, air conditioning, and/or lighting are switched off when a meeting room isn’t in use. In addition, facilities managers can make certain that meeting rooms are used for the right purpose so that three-person meetings aren’t held in rooms that fit up to 10 people, for example.

Reduce Paperwork

A meeting room booking system allows you to complete the entire booking process in Microsoft Outlook®, so you can avoid printing papers and faxing them back and forth. Furthermore, rather than using static, printed signs, you can display digital conference room signs with information about current and future events happening in specific meeting rooms. With our digital signage solutions, meeting information is automatically displayed on digital signs outside of the appropriate meeting rooms. Instead of writing your name on a piece of paper outside of a conference room to book it, you can use a digital sign with a touch screen to reserve a room or cancel, extend, or shorten a meeting.

By doing away with the need for staff to create, print, and post paper schedules, digital signage frees them up to focus on more business-critical activities. What’s more, when you book a meeting with room booking software and order associated services, order receipts are automatically sent to all internal and external service providers. Web-based means of ordering services eliminate the need for printing out and mailing or faxing order receipts to vendors.

Enhance Sustainability with Our Meeting Room Management System

Reduce costs, increase efficiency, boost productivity, and enhance your company’s sustainability with Resource Central, a Microsoft Outlook®meeting room booking system that makes meeting room management more environmentally friendly. Schedule for a free trial or online demo to give our comprehensive meeting and conference-planning tool a try.