5 strategies that can help you make the most of your meeting space
Always running out of meeting rooms? These 5 strategies can help you make the most of your meeting space.
Many organizations struggle with the feeling that there aren’t enough meeting rooms. However, this issue is often more about perception than reality. The truth is, in most cases, the space available is enough—it’s just not being used efficiently.
Before making the costly decision to rent more space or move to a new location, it’s important to consider a few key factors. By evaluating your current meeting room usage, you can likely uncover opportunities to make the most of what you already have.
Here are five important questions to guide you:
What is the proportion of ghost meetings?
Is the meeting culture out of control?
Are there other parts of the office that can be used as meeting areas without requiring rebuilding?
What is the utilization of breakout rooms and phone booths (if relevant)
How large is the proportion of meetings of 1-2 people?
These questions can help you identify inefficiencies and provide insight into how to better manage your existing space.
Let’s take a closer look at each and explore how meeting room availability can be improved with no extra space needed.
Reduce ghost meetings
Ghost meetings occur when a room is booked, but no one shows up for the meeting, leaving the space unused. This is a surprisingly common issue, with many organizations finding that 20-30% of their booked meetings fall into this category. These no-shows put an unnecessary strain on room availability, making it seem like there are fewer rooms than there really are.
To identify and address this issue, you can use our occupancy study app, which tracks room usage and helps you pinpoint ghost meetings. By analyzing occupancy data, our app shows how often rooms are booked but left unused. Armed with this information, you can reduce no-shows and free up valuable space for meetings that actually happen.
Read more detailed advice in this article about how to reduce ghost meetings.
Improve meeting culture
Many organizations struggle with inefficient meeting culture. Employees frequently express frustration over the amount of time spent in meetings that feel unproductive. This issue has only worsened in the post-pandemic workplace, where hybrid and remote setups have contributed to meeting overload. Not only do unnecessary meetings waste time, but they also consume valuable meeting room space, making it harder for teams to collaborate effectively when needed.
Poor meeting culture can have a ripple effect. It can lower employee morale, reduce productivity, and lead to disengagement. More meetings often do not mean better collaboration. Instead, they can create a sense of burnout and frustration among employees who feel they’re constantly being pulled away from their actual tasks.
Read this article for more details on how to improve meeting culture.
When fewer unnecessary meetings are scheduled, meeting rooms are more available for when they are genuinely needed.
Multipurpose other parts of the office to be suitable for meetings
Many offices have areas that often go unused, such as breakout spaces, coffee areas, and cafeterias. An occupancy study can help identify these spaces and show how they could be optimized for more informal meetings or quick discussions. By doing this, the office can reduce the pressure on traditional meeting rooms and increase the availability of meeting spaces overall.
This approach can have three important effects.
First, it provides more flexibility, as employees can use these newly optimized spaces instead of always relying on formal meeting rooms.
Second, it may lead to fewer unnecessary bookings of meeting rooms. Often, employees reserve meeting rooms far in advance just in case a meeting is needed, fearing they won't find a room when the time comes. But when the meeting is no longer necessary, they might forget to cancel, or worse, go through with a meeting that isn't needed simply because the room is already booked and on everyone's calendar.
Third, by encouraging the use of informal spaces, employees become more accustomed to having quicker, on-demand meetings. These informal meetings tend to be shorter and more focused, as they take place when necessary, rather than being scheduled far in advance. This helps reduce the overall time spent in meetings and makes meeting culture more efficient.
Increasing the utilization rate of breakout rooms and phone booths
Many organizations who have phone booths and breakout rooms might see that these are not used to its full potential. To find out if this is the case for your office, you should look at the utilization rates for these room types. Again, this can be done through an occupancy study. When you know whether these are highly occupied or not, you can start improving. If the rooms are not much use, the reasons can be many:
Lack of technical equipment
Inconvenient furnishing
Low room qualities such as being too small or not having enough air or light
Not being aesthetically pleasing, making meeting rooms a more tempting option
Location of the rooms being hidden
Rooms not being bookable, so employees book a meeting room to ensure they have a room
Use each point above as guidelines for improving the rooms, and find out which ones might affect how much they are used. It is common for these rooms to not have good enough qualities, which often can just make them into a complete lack of space. But it does not have to be like that, and they can be really useful both for small meetings, phone calls and focused individual work.
Redirecting the smallest meetings of 1-2 people
Many will be surprised to hear that 51% of all meetings only have one or two physical participants. Of the meetings with only one participant, 64% of these took place in a room with a capacity of 6 people of more - which is a huge waste of space.
Imagine just being able to move half of those smallest meetings to other spaces - it would have a huge effect on meeting room availability.
Some of the above mentioned points, such as improving (or even increasing) breakout rooms and phone booths, and create meeting-friendly spots in larger parts of the office that are unused, will get you far in trying to reduce the smallest meetings taking up a whole meeting room.
It is also a good idea to find the specific share of these smallest meetings for your organization. This way it can be communicated to employees, and effects can be measured after a certain time. Try to incentivize employees to have meetings of 1-2 people elsewhere.
Using an occupancy study as the foundation for decisions and change
All of the above improvements are related to an occupancy study. Conducting an occupancy study in your office provides detailed data on how each area is used. This gives you a solid foundation for making informed decisions. When you know how often, when, and by how many people each space is used, it becomes much easier to identify and communicate which changes are needed. It also allows you to track the impact of any changes made. This approach is far more cost-effective than renting additional space or relocating, and for most organizations, it will free up more than enough meeting space.