Fully Integrated Video Conference Room Booking Software

EMS Room Scheduling Software is the first to natively integrate leading video conferencing solutions to create a truly frictionless meeting experience, from scheduling to saying “hello!”

The modern workplace is and always has been about adapting your work experience to support digital collaboration, technology and tools. As a concept, Modern Workplace Initiatives were embraced by some but left as an aspirational concept for many more, earmarked as a problem to tackle in the mid- to long-range future. The inversion of the workplace for many global organizations that occurred with COVID-19 has changed that reality. Flexibility is no longer optional and the reduction of mobility for business means the nature of work must change and adapt.

Accruent’s EMS room and resource scheduling platform has remained a business-critical asset for hundreds of enterprises for decades by bridging people, spaces and technology. Our commitment to creating empowered workspaces means constant investment in features and integrations that create a workplace with less friction between employees, administrators and their resources. Recent investments in integrations with leading video conferencing platforms further enhances the user experience for meetings within and across physical and virtual spaces.

The Rising Demand for Workplace Flexibility

In March of 2019, before COVID-19, research showed that as much as 80 percent of U.S. workers would turn down a job that didn't offer flexible working and would prefer to work from home at least some of the time.

According to Global Workplace Analytics, after COVID-19 created a seismic shift in work life, a large majority (88%, from one survey) of professionals found themselves working from home, many for the very first time. As a result, 76% of global office workers (82% in the U.S.) say they want to continue to work from home, at least sometimes, when the pandemic is over.

One important thing to recognize: except for a small minority, most individuals prefer the hybrid approach to flexible work. That is, they would not prefer to work from home or from the office exclusively. What does this mean for your office space, undoubtably one of your organization’s largest expenses and greatest resources? Setting aside the challenges of bringing social distancing to the office and ensuring every employee has a safe space to call their own without skyrocketing real estate costs, enabling a more flexible workplace requires easy collaboration anytime, anywhere, regardless of which office you are (or are not) currently working from.

Frictionless Booking Workflows

To support continued collaboration between teams both locally and around the world, most organizations have adopted one of the leading video conferencing solutions – Zoom, Microsoft Teams, WebEx, etc. While all these services offer relatively simple methods for creating, joining and managing virtual meetings, they often do so with their own, separate endpoints. Video conferencing vendors often support Microsoft Outlook Integration as a step towards streamlining the employee workflow.

The reality, however, is these calendaring tools are only sufficient for the simplest, self-serve booking use cases and even then they often fall short. What does that mean for your organization?

• Double booking of spaces cannot be confidently avoided
• Less visibility into the amenities spaces provide
• No capacity for additional resource management like A/V or catering, or required terms and conditions that ensure compliance with safety policies
• No visibility into the utilization of spaces – Do you have enough meeting space? Too many offices? Opportunity for more revenue-generating event space? Are bookings being abandoned?

A frictionless booking workflow should give your users the ability to access and input all relevant information for a booking into a single system, all at once. They should be able to select an available space, check attendee availability, add a video conference, include special requests, notify security of visitors, and keep administrators and facilities staff informed.

EMS has long been the hub for these critical pieces of booking information, always tailored to the specific needs of the organization, the department and/or the space or booking type. It is the first meeting room booking system to include integration with major video conferencing platforms natively in our endpoints, checking yet another box for frictionless booking workflows.

How to Connect Physical and Virtual Meetings, Effortlessly

While creating a Teams or Zoom meeting is relatively painless, things get more complex when you factor in a meeting room. Also consider how coordinating meeting rooms across multiple buildings, locations or countries can become even more of a challenge.

Will every room be a “Zoom room” or otherwise be equipped with functional conferencing hardware?

Will every room have an attendee capable of getting things running quickly?

Are there AV team members available to make sure things run smoothly? How will you coordinate with them?

Studies have shown that, on average, nearly 10 minutes of an hour-long meeting are consumed by simply getting things set up and running. That projects to tens of billions of dollars in wasted time in the United States alone, on top of the less measurable employee frustration and negative impact such difficulties could have on corporate partners, clients and customers.

With the right technology, many of the challenges mentioned can be handled automatically with minimal burden on the user. Having a room booking system to handle all aspects of the physical spaces—checking room availability, creating the room reservation, setting the room status—integrated with video conference technology, both in-room and virtual, makes creating a hybrid meeting as simple as clicking a single button within your existing meeting room booking workflow.

When attendees arrive to their respective rooms, desks or home offices, they will not have to question whether the room setup is one they are familiar with. The room can be ready and waiting, aware of the meeting that is about to occur, kicking off with a single tap (or less).

EMS Room and Resource Scheduling Platform

Building a modern workplace strategy that places the very best the workplace has to offer often requires adopting a centralized solution like Accruent’s EMS Room and Resource Scheduling Software. Decades of industry experience have shaped EMS into a highly configurable, robust platform to support the broadest range of scheduling use cases that can be adapted to the unique needs of your organization.