Envoy Rooms makes room scheduling easier for everyone in your workplace

Do we have a room? Where are we meeting? Does this sound familiar? These questions pepper the hallways of workplaces everywhere. Many times, the answer will frustrate you— No, a room isn't booked, and no, you don’t know where you’re meeting. 

Meeting overload

Let’s face it—we’re all attending more meetings now than ever before. The average employee spends 9 hours per week in meetings—that’s over 400 hours per year! This trend is only set to continue, as 72% of business leaders spend more time in meetings now than five years ago. 

Meetings are where collaboration happens and they often lead to brilliant ideas. Many companies even encourage teams to create guidelines to make the best use of everyone’s time. But, even the most well-planned meeting can end up starting five minutes too late, in a room that’s too small, with technology that doesn’t work right. In those moments, when the pressure is on to match logistics with efficiency, meetings shift from productive to problematic.  

It’s stressful to think about the time and energy that goes into scheduling a single meeting. It’s even more stressful when you start to add those single meetings up, given that we spend over 10 full weeks of work in meetings every year.

Woes across the workplace 

These frustrating room experiences have become so common that they’ve resulted in poor meeting room etiquette. How often do employees complain about someone else sitting in a room they reserved for themselves? Based on a recent survey of office employees, 31% of employees own up to camping out in a room they did not reserve.

Have you ever tried to book a room for a last-minute meeting? It can be quite a challenge. Or, maybe you find a room only to discover it’s not equipped for the meeting you need to host. These moments happen all the time—a whopping 61% of employees have had to cancel or postpone a meeting due to a conference room issue. 

As a workplace leader, chances are you hear about meeting room issues, like room squatting or technical problems, after they’ve already happened. In an ideal world, you’d have the information you need to anticipate these issues and provide better recommendations to employees. 

When employees are spending so many hours struggling with meeting logistics, how are they supposed to focus on the work that matters? How can they focus on achieving the goals that impact the company’s bottom line?

Make room scheduling easier with Envoy Rooms 

Most workplaces, regardless of industry or size, put up with a bad room booking experience. That’s why we created Envoy Rooms, which helps companies solve their room scheduling challenges and improve the experience as a whole. Rooms helps you easily find and secure a place to meet, maximize your space, and make smarter decisions about your workplace.

Setup is simple and straightforward. You can introduce Rooms to your team and change the way they book meetings in as little as one afternoon. 

Working with, instead of against, employees

One problem is that existing solutions don’t work the way real people do. Employees are on the go, working in fast-paced environments, dashing from meeting to meeting. Many decisions are being made in real-time, leading to last-minute schedule changes. Because of this increased pace, more than a third of employees wait until less than a day before a meeting to reserve a space to meet. 

Room scheduling software usually requires advanced scheduling or a multi-step process. It’s not designed to make ad hoc or impromptu booking easy for employees. As a result, employees looking for a place to meet for a quick sync or last-minute meeting find themselves out of luck. With nowhere to meet, collaboration doesn’t happen, work slows down, and deliverables get delayed. 

Rooms offers a flexible solution that lets employees easily book rooms in whatever way works best for them. With Rooms, you can book a meeting right away at the room’s door, or book the nearest available room on mobile, using Bluetooth Low Energy communication.

Employees are often bombarded with various notifications in the form of emails, text messages, and push notifications. Rooms simplifies the notification process by letting the employee choose what they’d like to receive from one centralized location. Envoy lets them customize their meeting room, visitor, and package notification settings. Notifications can come from Envoy via mobile, email, Slack, Microsoft Teams and more.

Secure your space

Rooms helps fend off room squatters by requiring employees to check-in to a room to secure their reservation. Once an attendee has checked in, Rooms makes it clear the space is reserved and that it’s in use. Attendees can secure their space from anywhere. If you’re hustling from across the office for back-to-back meetings, you can rely on Envoy Rooms notifications on Slack or Microsoft Teams to help you secure your space and make a busy, meeting-filled day a little bit easier. 

If no one checks into a room, the space is freed after 5 minutes and can be used by team members looking for a place to meet. If a meeting ends early, the employee can tap the “End meeting” button on their way out of the room. This helps open up valuable meeting space in offices where space is in high demand. 

“Mixmax introduced Rooms as a solution to a pretty widespread squatting problem we were having with our phone booths.” said Mario Ramirez, Workplace Experience Manager at the email software company, Mixmax. “Since then, I’ve seen less conflict over bookings, less friction, and more employee happiness. Rooms creates certainty for people. Knowing that they can confidently secure a room improves their experience in our office.”

Make decisions based on data, not just instinct

For most companies, space is the second-highest cost after people. When building rooms can cost as much as $50k, gaining insight into your team’s space usage can save thousands in unnecessary expansion costs. 

All of the Rooms actions—reserving a room, booking an impromptu meeting, checking in, and ending early— generate valuable data on how your space is being used. Having straightforward analytics on the ways that your team uses your office’s available meeting space can inform cost-saving decisions. 

Maybe the team really needs more two-person meeting spaces, instead of a new 12-person conference room. Or maybe with an average of 25% of space freed up each day, you’ll discover you don’t need any new rooms at all. With visibility into how your meeting rooms are really being used, Envoy Rooms helps you make smarter decisions about your space. 

At Envoy, we look at workplace frustrations differently and strive to find ways to improve the bad experiences we have all become accustomed to. With Rooms, we are challenging the status quo and reimagining meeting room booking for teams everywhere.

Interested in getting started with Rooms? Kick-off your free trial today or get in touch with our Sales team for a demo.