Reserving a meeting room is a gamble, let's make it illegal (2016)

This is my first Blog post about workplace, released August 2016. For sure my thinking about booking has matured, but mostly this is still valid. - Tomi Teikko

traditional no-show meeting

Iceland once defeated England in UEFA Euro 2016 tournament with a score of 1-2 in regular playtime. Did you guess the score before the game started? Did you bet on the outcome? If your answer is yes, you would have won back 18 times your wager with the Finnish Betting Agency. I argue that predicting the number of participants physically attending your planned meeting and estimating the exact duration of the meeting is as difficult as knowing the results of a soccer match.

Guess the number of meeting attendees

Location and time have lost their significance in work. Thanks to tools transferred to the cloud and remote connections in companies, it's very hard to predict beforehand how many colleagues or clients will come to the office and physically participate in the meeting you're holding in the same meeting room. The arrival of all meeting guests in the same room is a miracle worth celebrating. Jake stayed home with a sick child, and Gertrude once again couldn't predict the traffic on Ring Road 1. That's why it's best to schedule every meeting remotely, like on Microsoft Teams or Google Meets.

Guess the duration of the meeting

Another difficult variable to predict is the length of the meeting. Can you time and prepare the meeting's agenda so precisely that you know to the minute how much time you have to conduct the meeting? Tanja's computer crashed right as the meeting began. Teemu and Seppo once again didn't read the material attached to the meeting invitation beforehand, and Heikki went to the bathroom. The more experienced the meeting leader is and the more carefully they've thought about the meeting's content and schedule in advance, the more accurate the result will be. Unfortunately, most daily meetings are called with a tentative agenda, and preparations for participants aren't made. We all likely also have recurring reservations in our calendars, like team meetings and monthly reports, whose implementation is uncertain and the number of participants impossible to estimate. Additionally, everyone likely has a physical meeting space reserved that never reaches the correct participant size.

Remove the meeting room reservation systems

We only use 35% of the actual capacity of meeting rooms during office hours. The low usage rate of meeting spaces is due to the previously mentioned variables and the traditional way of reserving a meeting room in advance. The usage rate of meeting rooms is at the level of the designated workstation, meaning that the meeting room is left completely empty, or a large 10-person room is half full.

Office spaces are expensive and saving on their costs leaves a nice amount of money under the line. Gatherings of over 10 people are events, and it's recommended to use event production professionals to produce an event, such as an office assistant, property restaurant manager, mood manager, or an external event production company.

Internet of Things as a tool for the meeting room

To curb resistance to change, tools should also be introduced that make everyday life easier. Nowadays, almost every room has a motion sensor that controls the room's lighting to save energy. For example, a red light can be added inexpensively outside the room that turns on when there are people in the room. The motion sensor is also easy to connect to the network, so the sensor is part of the Internet of Things (IoT), and data can be collected centrally from all the meeting rooms in the property. In addition to the motion sensor, sensors that count the users of the room can also be added inexpensively to the room.