Will Outlook be enough – or do I really need a room booking system?

As workspace technology specialists, we often hear this question from people who are just beginning to investigate the benefits of advanced room scheduling software.

They tell us they book a room in Outlook if it’s available, check if co-workers are free and then send a meeting invitation to them. Easy! And so it is — as far as it goes.

But Outlook falls short when it comes to these seven challenges:

1. Booking meeting rooms in different locations and time zones, with different services such as catering at each site

2. Seeing when visitors have arrived for the meeting, and guaranteeing a great first impression

3. Adjusting the room or date and time while keeping colleagues and service providers like the catering team informed

4. Releasing a room in good time, rather than just not showing up

5. Reserving catering, additional equipment or other services for your meeting

6. Having a clear view of room utilization, to make informed decisions on internal space and to avoid costly booking out options

7. Booking flexible space such as desks when you’re on the move.

Here are seven ways a quality room booking system such as Rendezvous by NFS helps you overcome these challenges and makes meetings perfect.

1. With Rendezvous, you can reserve rooms, car parking, desks as well as catering, services and AV as part of a single booking experience.

2. The Rendezvous Visitor component handles all aspects of meet and greet, host notification and badge printing, so your guests get a good experience, every time.

3. All meeting participants are automatically notified of any changes made to the booking as well as service providers such as catering, making sure nobody goes to the wrong room or catering is wasted.

4. Your room booking system will provide thorough, up-to-date reports, supporting better decisions on space planning and improving your room and desk use.

5. Reserving multi location meetings becomes a quick and efficient procedure with an easy-to-use room booking system. You can select multiple spaces from a high graphical calendar, check people’s availability and book that VC meeting.

6. No more no shows, they’ll become a thing of the past. If a meeting room is not being utilized, the room booking system automatically releases it, drastically improving room use. This can save thousands annually in wasted space.

7. A room booking system available on an app, such as Rendezvous Mobile, means your employees can access the system on the go — so they can reserve their space before they even reach the office.

Our system fully integrates with Outlook as well so everything happens automatically in your calendar and your staff will see a familiar interface.

So there’s just one answer to the question: “Do I really need a room booking system?” It’s YES — if it’s Rendezvous.

Learn more about workplace transformation and how it affects you here.

Open plan workspaces – are they really working for women around the world?

In January 2019, Australian labour workforce statistics showed there were slightly under 6m women employed in the country. This was a 2.4% increase in 2018, and by November 2019 the number had grown again to 6.117m. This steady growth has taken place in a market where employment stats for men have shown a slight decline.

So it seems women are quickly catching up to men in terms of bringing home the bacon.

It also means more and more women are spending their workdays in open plan office areas that have now become the standard in our corporate workplaces, with co-workers sitting side by side at large work tables or at tightly-packed workstations.

For years, CEOs around the world have led the drive towards open workspaces as a way of reducing costs and making their employees more productive — open plan environments were viewed as an ideal way of encouraging better performance through improved interaction. However, there’s little actual evidence that this view has delivered the expected results.

Recent intervention-based field studies conducted in Australia have tended to show both skewed and negative outcomes.

Maybe this shouldn’t be surprising, though, as the current average workspace-per-employee in Australia is fairly low compared with international standards for modern workplaces. The problems associated with open-plan offices have been widely analysed and reported, and they are well summarised in a recent Business Insider Blog posting.

Did you know:

Studies find that open-plan spaces can have a strongly negative impact on employees’ peace of mind — with a resulting decline in productivity.

And it seems this can be particularly true for women.

Various international research initiatives have shown some interesting results that indicate open-plan environments are not well suited to our growing female workforce.

Report 1

In the UK: Isolation, Discrimination, and the Paradox Effect of Open Plan

In 2018 a study on open plan workspaces was conducted by members of the independent scientific academy of the Royal Society of London.

Using advanced wearable sensors that produced real-time digital data collected by communication servers, the study gauged the positive or negative behavioural changes of employees as they engaged in face-to-face versus electronic (instant messaging and email) interactions.

Contrary to popular belief and expectations, the results of the study showed that open workspaces had a major negative effect on human interaction in the workplace. While electronic interactions increased, there was a whopping 70% drop in face-to-face interaction between co-workers.

But decreased face-to-face employee interaction isn’t the only negative outcome of implementing an open plan workspace. According to a different study, open plan layouts can also be seen as discriminatory.

This research focused on a local government moving its 1,100 employees from smaller traditional office layouts and locations to a single, large open plan environment over three years.

During this period 13 men and 27 women were interviewed on multiple formal occasions as well as being involved in a programme of meetings, coffee breaks and lunch breaks with employees involved in the study.

What it discovered:

The study concluded that many women became hyper-aware of being watched on a constant basis, while also reporting that they felt their appearance was on trial.

Several women employees also reported that “there isn’t anywhere that you don’t feel watched.” There was no evidence of men feeling similar or any indication the men had changed their actions as a result of the change in privacy from the open-plan workspace.

Report 2

The United States: The Temperature and the Damage Done

A joint study by members of the United States’ University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business and Germany’s WZB Berlin Social Science Center discovered that the average open plan office temperature sits at around 21 degrees Celsius, which is directly based on the “metabolic rates of men,” while leaving women employees uncomfortable at work.

What it discovered:

The study found the effects went far beyond women simply feeling uncomfortable — the amount of effort applied to specific tasks as well as overall performance in maths verbal tasks were adversely affected by even relatively small decreases in office temperature.

The study shows women are literally being left behind in the cold when it comes to open spaces in the workplace.

Report 3

Real Potential: Indian Women Break Through

While women across the western world, and Australia, are progressing in leaps and bounds in the workforce, there is still a lot of work to be done in other countries.

Take India for example. Less than one-quarter of women age 15 and above, participated in India’s workforce in 2018. This is compared to an Indian workforce composed of 78.6% of men. However, the low rate of women currently in India’s labour force is partly related to an uptick in numbers continuing their education.

This is great news — increasing the number of women in the workforce by 10 percent could increase India’s GDP by $770 billion by 2025. It will be interesting to watch India change, as more women exit their secondary education and find suitable jobs.

So how SHOULD our workplaces evolve?

In general, open-plan workspaces don’t seem to have lived up to their expected promise of increased interaction and productivity.

Some studies even suggest they may have had the reverse effect — triggering withdrawal behaviour from officemates who then interact more over email and other digital channels.

Women appear to be the group worst affected by the negative aspects of the open-plan office, with reports of unease related to “always being on show” and discomfort associated with environments that have largely been designed from a male perspective.

But women continue to play an increasingly large role in the workplace, and it makes sense to pay more attention to catering to their specific needs rather than simply implementing open plan design concepts that are disconnected with the real demands of our modern working environments.

Finding the workplace technology solution that works

We need to consider other options that help to alleviate the negative, stressful aspects of open plan workspace design; options that may be better aligned to the work that needs to be done or the preferences of our employees — such as traditional office spaces, flexible meeting and conference spaces, team rooms, collaboration spaces, quiet spaces, huddle spaces and focus pods.

With an increasing number of workspace configurations and options at our employees’ disposal, it has also become essential to provide employees with a workplace technology solution designed to help in finding the ideal workspace for a particular workday, or selecting the best room layout for a meeting together with its various associated services such as fully integrated catering and hospitality services, visitor management and parking space reservation.

Modern workplace technology solutions allow us to fully connect our workspace with everything from meeting room scheduling, video conferences, visitor management, digital signage, and catering.

For example, the workplace technology solution offered by NFS Technology’s Rendezvous Workspace, allows staff to use an app to book meetings quickly across multiple locations and time zones. If the meeting time changes, it notifies you.

In addition, remote employees can easily find and book the desk they need at any time — and they can specify what they want down to small but important details such as a quiet space or a cool temperature.

The way we use our workspaces is continuing to evolve, all around the world, and the workforce is changing too. But if you’re seeking the perfect path forward for your workplace on the route, combining the benefits of open plan with care for each individual worker’s needs could be the perfect answer.