How to Organize Your Meeting Rooms for Maximum Productivity

How to Organize Your Meeting Rooms for Maximum Productivity

When you set foot into your meeting room, what happens? Do you get down to business quickly? Or do you waste precious work time fumbling with technology, chatting with colleagues, or on non-pressing matters? If it’s the latter, you might not have your meeting rooms organized for maximum productivity. Here’s how to turn that around.

Schedule Your Meetings

Have you ever heard the expression, “what gets scheduled gets done?” The idea is, if it’s on the schedule, it’s in your mind that it needs finishing.

The same sentiment is true with a meeting room. If you book a conference room for a specific period of time, as opposed to keeping your usage open-ended, you put a stop time on your meeting. Doing this simple gesture forces you to accomplish what you need to in the allotted time period, which in turn forces you to be more productive in your meetings.

Take Away the Chairs

You might have already reorganized your team for maximum productivity, but what about your meeting room layout? When you cozy up around the conference room table, it’s easy to get lost in chit chat. Before you know it, a half hour has passed and you’ve accomplished nothing.

Stand-up meetings were designed to combat this. They were first introduced in the army years ago, and now they’re quickly becoming incorporated in businesses across the United States. Lieutenant General William G. Pagonis was famous for the standup meeting style. He found that when people would sit at a meeting, the meeting would go over an hour. When people would stand, they’d talk faster and limit what they had to say to only the necessities.

Make meetings more efficient and help your team get to the point faster by taking away the chairs.

Make Plugging-In Easier

One of the biggest time drains is connectivity. So much of what we do is online or on the computer. It makes sense that attendees will need to plugin to be productive.

Make it easier to get plugged in so you waste less time fussing with technology and spend more time on what matters. Post the WiFi password if you regularly welcome outsiders into your conference room, or better yet, send it to them ahead of time.

You should also position your table so there is easy access to the outlets in the room.

If you plan to have your attendees plug into a television screen, have all of the necessary cables ready. Don’t anticipate that they’ll bring their own and immediately know where or how to plug them into your system. By having a connection box ready, you will save valuable minutes on getting set up.

Standardize Your Systems

The easier it is for your team to access and use your meeting rooms, the more productive and efficient they can be while they’re working. By standardizing your technology across the office, you eliminate common problems that can quickly derail productivity. Do this before your meetings begin and you’ll eliminate common technology hiccups on the backend.

Author Profile Jon Forknell is the Vice President and General Manager of Atlas Business Solutions, Inc., a software marketing company specializing in employee scheduling software, including ScheduleBase employee scheduling software, and other business software solutions. In the past, Jon has been recognized by the U.S. Small Business Administration as a SBA Young Entrepreneur of the Year. Atlas Business Solutions was named as one of Software Magazine’s Top 500 Software Companies in 2004 through 2007 and again in 2010, 2013 and 2014.