How Conference Room Scheduling Software Can Improve Collaboration on Your Team

Room scheduling software offers a more efficient way to reserve shared workspaces and provides data and analytics that help businesses plan for today and tomorrow. 

But, it’s not just about efficiency and convenience—using a room scheduling tool can actually increase your company’s feeling of cohesion and make it easier to collaborate. 

What is conference room scheduling software?

Conference room scheduling software refers to a tool that allows administrators and employees to monitor, reserve, and utilize designated, shared workspaces in the office. 

Employees can reserve spaces for meetings with ease and relax knowing the room will be available when they arrive to get started. And operational leaders benefit from historic and real-time data to better strategize capacity planning and space utilization. 

Every room scheduling solution comes with its own set of features and functionalities, but most allow you to: 

• View and reserve conference spaces or meeting rooms
• Enable visibility into room usage through analytics 
• Display current and future booking status of rooms
• Access data on who is using conference rooms and for how long

What’s more, room scheduling software supports team and cross-functional collaboration as companies bring their employees back to work. 

Using a tool specifically for this makes it easy for managers or employees to reserve rooms from afar, and helps businesses enforce capacity limits to ensure safe collaboration. 

Since trust and connection can be hard to build and sustain from afar, meeting rooms offer hybrid teams a chance to connect in-person for activities like brainstorming, collaboration, and team building.

Using conference room scheduling software to support collaboration

1. Better communication = better collaboration

While Zoom was a lifeline for businesses throughout the pandemic, it’s not without its shortcomings. Online communication is just more challenging, and that’s something we’ve all experienced. Take, for example, the difficulty of conveying the right tone in an email or struggling to interpret an emoji via Slack. 

That’s because we actually “say” more with our non-verbal communication than verbal communication.Small gestures like tilting your head, pursing your lips, or motioning with your hands can provide key cues to the meaning of your message—and whether or not the recipient is understanding what you’ve said. 

These are powerful transmitters of meaning but can be missed in purely digital work. 

In-person communication allows for better exchange of information as both the speaker and listener can see, receive, and interpret body language, tone of voice, and facial expressions. 

When we can better exchange information, we can better exchange ideas. In other words, greater communication allows for greater collaboration. 

As employees work together once more from the office, room scheduling software simplifies the process to reserve shared spaces so we can get back to the best kind of collaboration—in-person. 

2. Face-to-face communication builds trust

Do you ever feel more connected to people you meet in-person than those you get to know virtually? There’s a reason why, and it’s not just about body language.

Research published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology suggests that in-person communication is viewed as more trustworthy than email.

As such, it’s important to meet in-person to build and reinforce trust across teams.. Take for example a project manager looking to engender trust and accountability on a cross-functional team with members who may not know one another. Or an account executive close to landing a new client with a multi-year contract. 

In these instances, you can’t overemphasize the importance of in-person interaction. Using a tool to reserve a room ahead of time makes it easy to ensure you’ll have the space you need to build your next high-performing team, or nail the new client meet-and-greet. 

3. In-person communication supports relationships

For teams in a hybrid workplace, meeting in-person is a powerful tool to support relationship building. One survey found that 85% of executives say they prefer in-person meetings for the ability to build stronger, more meaningful business relationships. In-person meetings create time for connection and small talk, which bolster employee relationships. 

While this makes for a more pleasant workplace environment, the perks don’t end there. Research published in Systems Research and Behavioral Science shows that interpersonal workplace relationships support workplace psychological safety, which in turn leads to better team outcomes and increased learning behaviors in organizations. 

Psychological safety, first coined by Harvard Business Professor Amy Edmonson, refers to the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. 

Again and again, psychological safety is identified as one of the defining traits of high-performing teams. That’s because it encourages employees to ask questions, pitch ideas, and push back. Taken together, the effects of psychological safety can lead to more productivity and better business outcomes. 

But to build psychological safety on your team, you must have strong relationships. And, a key part of building strong relationships is having at least some amount of the relationship be built in-person. 

Encourage your team to make use of shared work spaces to build connection

A conference room scheduling tool can be used for work meetings, brainstorming, coworking, or simply as a place where coworkers can be social when they come into the office. 

For example, consider using a room scheduling tool to book a block of coworking time every week, where employees can come into the office and work on projects together and chat through issues in an informal, collaborative way. 

And, encourage your team to book rooms for brainstorming sessions, for an open-door Q&A session with leadership, or simply to catch up with team members they don’t see often. 

In today’s hybrid workplace, businesses need solutions that support the teams from near and far. So, it’s important to get creative and find new ways to foster collaboration. 

Conference room scheduling software supports collaboration as individuals and teams come back to the office. 

While using a tool isn’t essential, it enables your employees to book rooms easily on their own, without having to rope in your HR, People Operations, or other administrative team. This empowers your team to build their own creative ways to collaborate, while reducing administrative work.  

If you’re interested in exploring Eden Workplace’s room scheduling software, you can read more about it here—or reach out to us today to schedule a demo.