Around the world, employees have been either working from home or working at the office in some restrictive capacity or another. With employees out of the office, or at least unable to meet to the extent they once did, it may seem illogical to even consider implementing a meeting management system.
Yet, what if now was the perfect time to take the plunge? Now when offices are partially empty, prime for installs with minimal impact on productivity. Now, when we all know social distancing won’t fully go away for some time to come. But what are the benefits of implementing a meeting room management system?
Limit Room Capacity
Across the world, companies are in the process of reopening their offices and workspaces. As their employees return to the office, a level of social distancing is still in effect. Gatherings, even in the workplace, are limited to few people and will be for some time to come.
With a meeting management system, you can set a limit to how many employees can enter a meeting room per meeting. Keeping gatherings small, even office meetings reduces the risk of a pandemic spreading among the employees.
Contact Tracing
One ill and contagious employee could mean more unwell employees. Multiple unwell employees means a loss in productivity and endangering the safety of your employees. So, what if you had a way to find out who the contagious employee encountered in a day?
When booking a meeting room, most meeting management systems offer a hub of information on which employees organized and got invited to which meetings. Such details can give you a path to trace possible contaminations within your company and isolate them before they spread.
Global companies need to harvest the empty offices’ momentum
There are two main reasons why global companies would benefit from installing a meeting management system during COVID-19. Firstly: no one knows when the next time all of your worldwide office locations will have few to no employees around to be impacted by meeting room upgrades. Now is a prime time to initiate installations that could interfere with room bookings and the efficiency of the office space.
Secondly, countries will recover from COVID-19 differently. While one country is reopening offices, another will still have them closed. While one country is doling out vaccines, another may be a step behind attaining them. Making your meeting spaces more efficient and dependable will have a huge impact on how quickly your company recovers compared to other companies in your field.
Support Flexible Workspace
For the past decade, companies have been noticing the benefits of flexible workspaces. More and more employers have embraced remote working, unorthodox meeting spaces, open-office concepts, and more. In fact, it was the companies that had already embraced flexible work environments that fared the best when COVID-19 struck.
Investing in a meeting management system can help keep meetings as flexible as the office space, enabling employees to book and attend on the fly, or find meeting rooms in unconventional office spaces. Also, many meeting management systems help employees remotely find out whether a space is free or not, rather than having multiple people come into contact with the same space just to check.
IT Infrastructure Updates
No doubt, most companies are frantically updating their infrastructure to support remote working or more flexibility in their work environments. In the shadow of COVID-19, companies who don’t update their system may fall behind their competitors as they wait out the pandemic.
While you’re updating your infrastructure, you might as well look ahead to the future. Invest in technology that will help your company thrive when the employees do get back into the office. A meeting management system might be the boost your company needs to come one a step ahead in the coming months.
Conclusion
Ultimately, none of us know how long it will take for this virus scare to leave us. How long after will we wear masks or be wary of who we encounter in a day? How long will we be monitoring every cough and cold discovered in the workplace?
The two concepts to take away from this article are two concepts that most of us have in our minds already: how can we stay productive during this pandemic and how can we thrive once it’s over? Or, on a darker note, how can we adapt if it’s never over?
Although a meeting management system won’t solve all of your problems, it sure would help. How well each company survives this pandemic will depend on how well their employees stay connected. How well a company recovers from the pandemic will depend on how well the company can communicate within itself. Therefore, iron out your meeting rooms and meeting processes so that your company can rocket through and out of this crisis.