Meetings may be the bane of many knowledge workers lives, but in today’s workplace, meetings are still the primary area where decisions are made. A well-run meeting improves collaboration, increases the speed of decision-making, gains consensus and clarifies next steps. But there is one aspect of meetings that comes up time and again as the Achilles heel of the meeting world: it’s not the lack of clear actions at the conclusion, it’s not the failure to send the agenda out prior to t
he meeting, it’s not having the wrong people in the room; it’s the whole experience of booking a meeting room.
We’ve all been there; your client or internal project team has called an urgent meeting, you send out the outlook invites, you head down to the meeting rooms and not one is free. Some are being occupied, some say they’re being occupied but no-one is in them. You knock on the door of one and ask your colleagues how long they are going to be, you ask the receptionist if you can get a room, to which they politely respond, ‘no, they’re all booked up, you should have organised last week’. As your frustration mounts, the time ticks away. You decide to jump into one of the empty but ‘booked’ meeting rooms, only to be promptly asked to leave by the next occupant, who was simply running a few minutes late. Finally, you admit defeat and end up down the road, squeezed around a tiny table in the local Costa, laptop on knee.
In today’s workplace, we haven’t always got the luxury of booking a meeting two weeks in advance and we don’t always need the room for exactly one hour; work today is fast paced, collaboration is organic and unstructured. You need the flexibility to use meeting rooms as your people want to use them and not how outlook wants to structure them. This is where we’re starting to see greater demand for meeting room booking systems. A system like GoBright can really alleviate the problems you are facing – here’s how:
1. Visibility for everyone:
By having 
an interface outside each meeting room, it is easy for everyone to see if a room has been booked or how long it is free for. Something as simple as lighting up red when the room is in use or green if it is free, means availability can be quickly ascertained without peering into the window of each room.
2. Flexibility:
Meeting going to over-run? No problem. Just open the door and manually amend your booking using a simple touch-screen. If the room is already booked, you can easily see if other rooms are available, without having to physically check them or going back to the receptionist.
3. In advance or on the go:
Book a meeting room from your desktop via the Microsoft exchange server – just like Outlook – or directly at the meeting room via the touch-sensitive screen. The two are perfectly synchronised so you know you always have the most up to date availability for each room.
4. Easy to use:
A system which simply connects to an exchange server or Google Apps, provides easy installation which is as straightforward as adding a new user to the system. And avoid new-tech-training issues with a system that works exactly like Outlook, so end-users are already familiar with the system.
5. Complete Communication:
Remove the hassle of reporting faulty equipment or problems with the room by allowing people to log directly from the interface outside the room. This way, problems can be resolved quickly, so you don’t arrive at your meeting only to find the projector is broken or the chairs have disappeared!
At TecInteractive, we are committed to finding and providing the best meeting room technology solutions on the market, which is why we recommend GoBright Room Booking System. It provides all the functionality listed above so your meetings can be as time and cost effective as you need them to be – so the focus can be on collaboration, not on booking the room.
For more information contact our friendly team on 01332 414 111 or click below.
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