Space Management vs. Room Management. What's the difference?
Navigating the realm of hybrid work models post-pandemic demands a keen understanding of essential workplace technologies. Amidst this landscape, distinguishing between space management and meeting room management tools becomes crucial for optimizing safety, productivity, real estate ROI, and employee experience.
Space management revolves around the meticulous planning, scheduling, and utilization of physical spaces within a workplace. It encompasses various areas such as co-working facilities, offices, cubicles, and huddle spaces, necessitating efficient tracking and management of available resources. With innovative space management software, the arduous task of monitoring and assigning space becomes streamlined, offering valuable insights into space utilization and empowering informed decision-making regarding office layouts.
Conversely, meeting room management focuses specifically on structuring and overseeing meeting spaces within an organization. From booking rooms to ensuring seamless scheduling and utilization, meeting room management software alleviates the common pitfalls of wasted time and resources associated with searching for available meeting spaces. By integrating with existing calendars and offering real-time availability displays, these tools enhance productivity and efficiency in collaborative endeavors.
What is Space Management?
Space management is the process of maintaining, planning, and scheduling a physical space for optimum utilization. Spaces here include co-working facilities, offices, cubicles, huddles spaces, or any space that requires management. Space management in the office involves tracking who’s onsite, desk management, finding colleagues, tracking available conference rooms, and other physical space in the workplace.
Without the right tools, space management can be a herculean task for the average office or facility manager. However, with a great space management software, tracking and managing available space in the office can be easier than ever.
Space management software automates the process of monitoring and assigning available space. It also provides analytics on space usage, so your company can make informed decisions about its office space. With space management software, you can gain a comprehensive view of who’s using your office workspace alongside real-time analytics on how a space is being used.
Advantages of Office Space Management Software
According to 2017 research by Senion, 37% of US office workers reported that between 25% and 50% of the desks in their offices were unoccupied on any given day. This means the average company may be wasting thousands of dollars in unused space.
With good space management software, you can increase your organization’s ROI by recapturing wasted space and saving on operational costs. Other space management benefits include:
- Higher workplace productivity
- Fewer scheduling conflicts
- Automated workflows
- Improved real estate ROI
- Enhanced employee safety. Especially in a hybrid situation
- Improved employee wellbeing
What is Meeting Room Management and Room scheduling?
Studies show that 40% of workers in large organizations waste up to 30 minutes daily looking for a meeting space. That’s roughly 10 hours per month and more than a full day of work.
Luckily, wasted space and time in the office can easily be mitigated with good meeting room management and room scheduling software.
Room scheduling is any process an organization uses to structure and manage its meeting spaces. Meeting room management involves monitoring available meeting places within an organization, booking these rooms ,and assigning them to scheduled employees.
Like space management, you can automate room scheduling through meeting room booking software. Meeting room management software simplifies the process of booking meetings, eliminates scheduling conflicts, and organizes the use of meeting space in an office building. It also prevents zombie meetings and gives you intelligent data to better utilize resources.
Benefits of Room Scheduling Software
Aside from preventing double-booking and wasted zombie meetings, room scheduling has several benefits. These benefits include:
- Increasing employee productivity.
- Tracking what meeting rooms are used the most and which are used the least.
- Ensuring meeting rooms remain available in times of urgency.
- Ensuring only authorized office members are allowed into a meeting room.
- Integrating with existing company calendars so you can easily book spaces in-advance.
Meeting Room Management software is most effective with an integrated conference room scheduling display, like the ASTRO All-in-One which shows real-time space availability at a glance.
Now that we have an idea of what space management and room scheduling are, let's explore the differences between them.
Space Management vs. Meeting Room Management
The major difference between space management and meeting room management is the scope. Space management encompasses the management and optimization of every inch of physical space in a facility; including huddle spaces, break rooms, lounges, and desks. Space management incorporates other utilization tools, like the SPOT Desk Booking Puck which is ideal for desk management and creates bookable spaces based on your company needs and safety policies.
Meeting room management instead primarily focuses on the utilization and management of spaces used for meetings, conferences, and other collaborative sessions. It is more specific and covers particular rooms within the workplace.
Space management, originally a purely real estate term, can be implemented by any organization with a space. Organizations small and large can enjoy the savings and ease provided by proper space management. It’s a versatile process that can be employed by anyone outside the workplace.
Meeting room management on the other hand is not as broad as space management. In short, meeting room management can be described as a smaller twin to space management.
The comprehensive nature of space management makes it an ideal solution for enterprise companies looking to enable hybrid work or maximize ROI on space. To achieve this, such businesses would need excellent space management software supported by top-tier hardware.
Best Software for Space Management and Meeting Room Management
There are a variety of space management software options, each boasting unique space management features, and oftentimes these features include meeting room booking.
However, in this article, we will deal with three main software provides for space and room management:
Teem: Teem office management software offers an extensive list of features designed to streamline the way space is used in the workplace. These features include desk booking, room scheduling, and analytics to track space utilization. A unique aspect of Teem's space management software is their wayfinding and navigation system. With one click on a display system, like the SCOUT Wayfinding Kiosk, visitors and staff alike can easily locate rooms and sanitizing stations within the office.
Proximity: Proximity offers a holistic space management platform for co-working and enterprise. Its space management and meeting room booking software includes onsite check-ins, hot desking, wifi access control, and even remote automatic door locks for building security.
Indoor Finders: Indoor Finders offers a simple yet effective space management and meeting room booking software. You can easily plan seating arrangements and manage resources. You can also filter rooms based on your preferred meeting time, room size, and type.
No matter the size of your organization, implementing space management and meeting room management software should be a priority. Not only is it cost-effective, it also ensures the safety of employees and visitors within your facility.
If you’re looking for sophisticated and simple to integrate display systems and tools for hot-desking, room scheduling, wayfinding, and employee tracking, PowerBx has you covered. All of our products are equipped with enterprise-grade security and designed with the hybrid workplace in mind.