Find an analysis tool
To even know where to start, you need to look at the numbers. You can always ask employees what they think through a survey but perceptions don’t always match up with reality. For an objective viewpoint and to get the complete picture we recommend having an analysis tool to measure and evaluate your meetings. Once your meetings are measured, you can quickly gain insight into how your meeting rooms are being utilized and how you can improve them.
Are your rooms fully booked everyday?
You might want to look at the meeting room usage to plan your physical meeting spaces. Is it an even level of usage across each room? If you see that a large room is regularly full while small rooms are not widely used, maybe you need to create more larger rooms from several smaller ones – and vice versa.
A low meeting room usage overall could also mean that people are having meetings outside working hours or in other places than the meeting rooms. For example they might be having loud and disturbing “over the desk meetings” which seems okay on the surface but can hurt employee satisfaction overall.
Time management and meeting quality
Check out the standard meeting time, is it several hours? Shorter meetings are generally a good thing so monitor this metric and intervene if it gets too high. What can leaders do to shorten up meetings? Publicly urge employees to keep meetings shorter and set an example by using a meeting agendas.
Extending meetings
If you have a lot of people extending their meeting this also tells you about a meeting culture where the time estimations are off. See if you can do anything to help people with keeping their meeting time.
Also, check the total meeting room usage. Extended meetings plus low meeting room usage could tell you that you have too many meeting rooms.
If you notice that people are using meeting rooms as working space you could rethink your meeting room setup. Maybe you need more designated working areas?
A checklist for better meetings:
- Put your meeting do’s and dont’s visibly in meeting rooms, on a table card or a wall poster – just like the wifi password.
- Invest in a meeting booking system that can give statistics.
- Think out of the box, be open to rearrange your meeting room setup to fit needs.