What’s the ROI of Meeting Room Software?
There are several scenarios you have to consider when calculating the ROI of your meeting room software. First, if your office manager schedules the conference rooms, you have to account for his or her time. Then you have to account for lost productivity of team members who have to deal with double bookings or even a total lack of available rooms. And then, in the worst case scenario, there’s deals that get impeded or even fall through because there are no rooms available to work through the deal details.
Let’s take a look at the dollars and cents behind these different scenarios.
The ROI of Your Office Manager’s Time
If your company doesn’t have meeting room software, there’s a high likelihood that you’re patching together a conference room reservation system with your office manager as the default point of contact. While it may seem like an acceptable use of your office manager’s time, the job of an office manager is never done. There are always tiny little fires that need to attended to on a daily basis. Adding meeting room management to the list of duties only takes away valuable time from other pressing needs.
According to Payscale, the average salary of an office manager in the United States is $43,107 a year. If we divide that by the standard 2,087 annual working hours (based on a 40-hour work week), then that comes out to $20.65 an hour.
If your office manager is spending an average of 90 minutes a day on coordinating schedules, sending emails, and internal chat messages to meeting participants in order to manage the conference room schedule, that amounts to 33 hours a month spent on the conference room schedule (based on the average of 22 working days a month).
Multiply the 33 hours spent on managing the conference room by the $20.65 hourly rate of your office manager and you are spending an average of $681.45 on conference room management a month.
With an open conference room reservation system, anyone in your office can book their own conference room reservations. That not only reduces your management expense, but it also frees up your office manager’s time for handling other tasks.
The Hidden Cost of Poorly Managed Conference Rooms
A couple of the most common side effects of not using meeting room software are meetings running late and the double booking of the conference room. Occasional situations like these can cause slight irritation for your employees and a few unproductive moments. But if it persists into a chronic problem, then your company will lose a great deal of productivity and will waste large amounts of money on poorly used salary time.
Let’s say that once per week a team of four software engineers goes intp a conference room, wanting to discuss their progress. But each week the meeting ahead of theirs is running twenty minutes late. They could go walk back to their desks to wait, but they’re most likely not going to get any work done in the intervening minutes. So they just wait for the previous meeting to finish.
Each week this team wastes 20 minutes waiting for their conference room to become available. The average salary of a software engineer is $78,669 a year. Again, if we divide this annual salary by the average work year of 2,087 hours, that comes out to $37.69 an hour, or $12.56 every 20 minutes. That means your team of four software engineers is wasting $200.96 of productivity every month waiting for the conference room to open up. Think of how much more money your company is losing if more than one meeting per week is late?
Opportunity Cost of Not Using Meeting Room Software
The black and white numbers of not using meeting room software are clear. But you really have to crunch the numbers to see the value of your meeting room software and there are some people who rely more on intuition than hard data.
The opportunity cost of not using meeting room software can far exceed any amount of lost productivity based on employee salaries.
Poorly managed conference rooms can cause any number of problems; including meetings starting late, conference rooms being double-booked, and a disproportionate number of meeting attendees vs. the conference room size.
Should any of these problems occur before a new client meeting, it could cost your more than a few hundred dollars a month.
Clients can be fickle, especially when they’re sent out an RFP and are listening to a number of pitches. There are even some professionals who plan out their entire day in 15-30 minute increments. If your conference room is doubled book and you’re left outside waiting to make your presentation, you could already have lost the account.
Can your business afford to lose a $1 million account because you didn’t have a conference room reservation system in place?
The old adage of time is money definitely applies to your meeting room. Lost productivity due to an inadequate meeting room system will cost your company thousands of dollars over the course of a year. It’s clear the ROI of meeting room software is well worth the investment.
