What is Meeting and Conference Room Utilization?

Using room usage insights to optimize space utilization and operational costs 

It may seem strange at first to measure and review occupancy and usage metrics for meeting and conference rooms. They’re used daily for small and large meetings, events, brainstorm sessions, and even presentations, right?

Well, measuring meeting and conference room utilization can help support better decision-making and enable an organization to make improvements to workspaces to help facilitate better collaboration and business value.

In the modern workplace that has shifted away from assigned seats and desks, proper space planning is important for an agile workplace to function. Especially if a variety of meeting room types are needed.

Understanding Meeting and Conference Room Utilization Metrics

Measuring utilization for meeting workspaces involves quantity and quality metrics.

• How can you determine if you have enough conference rooms for your employees?
• Do your employees have enough spaces to collaborate as needed?
• How can you be sure employees are using meeting rooms?
• How can you maximize meeting or conference room usage?

All these questions can be answered by meeting and conference room utilization metrics. These data points measure how often conference and meeting room workspaces are used around the office, who uses them (occupancy), and why and how they’re being used.

Meeting room and conference room usage metrics will help you identify what’s working and gaps that you need to solve around availability, design, and space-to-employee ratios.

Why It’s Important to Measure Workspace Usage

When an office has a variety of teams on-site or remote, it’s important to track the different meeting room types you may have to understand how different spaces are utilized and what needs to be solved to properly accommodate employees.

A report by HOK, an architecture-engineering firm, found that nearly 75% of meetings are attended by groups of no more than four people. This tells you that having more meeting rooms that can fit about six to eight people is a good idea, while only a few larger conference rooms are needed.

For example, your product development team may need daily meetings to discuss project status, updates, versioning and issue control, and prioritize tasks for the day. But your marketing team may need only a large weekly meeting for all 14 employees, and daily huddle sessions for a few people in a smaller space. To help meet the needs of different teams while growing your business and/or workforce, and maximizing room utilization, it’s key to understand how each meeting room and conference room is being used.

This is where room scheduling software and analytics tools come in.

How to Calculate Meeting and Conference Room Utilization?

The easiest way to calculate meeting and conference room utilization is to use a room scheduling software solution. This can help streamline both meeting and conference room usage and management.

For example, workspace booking solutions make it easy to automate room management by showing available and unavailable rooms with color-coded maps, integrating with employees’ calendar and email solutions, as well as with digital room displays and workplace sensors to provide on-site visual indicators and automate turnover for optimal room usage.

Workplace analytics tools though are where this data really comes to life. Up-to-date insights and dynamic business intelligence dashboards and reporting can provide a comprehensive picture to help any business better understand and optimize meeting and conference room usage.

Some of the benefits of using a workplace analytics tool for meeting and conference room utilization include:

• Collect and analyze data from calendars, orders, bookings and more
• Unveil insights to enhance productivity, room usage, employee satisfaction, and operational efficiency
• Improve resource allocation
• Monitor workspace and resource usage
• Understand trends in meeting and conference room usage including busiest times of day, shortages, which teams use meeting rooms more, etc.
• Predict future workplace needs, including adaptions for spaces as a workforce grows
• Identify workspace utilization patterns

5 Tips to Implement for Better Workspace Usage Insights

1. Integrate workplace sensors into your workplace to expedite meeting room and resource usage and turnover
2. Use exported reports to help answer key stakeholder questions and make better data-driven decisions
3. Choose a solution that works with your office’s existing technologies (Add-On Products´ workplace analytics software works with Microsoft Office 365 technologies to offer a seamless experience and connected reporting)
4. Leverage a meeting and conference room booking solution for all employees to ensure workspaces support on-premises, remote and flexible employees
5. Share workspace usage insights with team leaders and employees to help work together to solve operational gaps and concerns

Capturing Meeting and Conference Room Usage Metrics Can Lead to Better Usage

Understanding how your existing meeting room spaces (and other workspaces) are used can help you optimize the setup, design and layout for a more productive workplace.

This can improve the flow of an office, how collaborative spaces are, and even reduce overhead and operations costs related to meeting and conference room usage and resources.

Capturing the complete picture of how your meeting and conference rooms are utilized can help provide actionable insights to improve business operations and costs. If you’d like to learn more about how Add-On Products´ technologies can help you efficiently do this, click here to set up a quick chat with our team.