How HESTA employees got clarity on real-time meeting room availability

The challenge

With hundreds of employees spread across multiple locations the Australian health workers’ pension fund needed a reliable meeting room schedule display solution to ensure optimal utilization of their meeting rooms.

Before HESTA contacted us, they were using Microsoft Exchange to handle their meeting room scheduling displays. Tired of meeting rooms not being utilized properly as well as a lack of insights into how the rooms were being utilized HESTA knew it was time for a change in the way they handled their meeting room booking.

When HESTA contacted us, their needs were very clear.

They wanted:

• A way to gauge the utilization of their meeting rooms by being alerted to no-shows,
• Give their employees a way to easily find an available meeting room when they needed one,
• A way to enable spontaneous meetings without interfering with scheduled meetings,
• An easy way for employees to extend their meetings without checking Outlook calendars,
• A way for employees to free up rooms when meetings end early,
• A way to alert service as well as colleagues when there’s an equipment malfunction in a specific room.

The solution

We helped HESTA implement digital booking panels outside each of their meeting rooms, which allowed the superannuation fund to change the way their meeting rooms were being used.

The key feature which made sure HESTA was able to achieve meeting room use optimization was the check-in and release features located on the meeting room panel. This lets employees know if a previously booked meeting room becomes available due to cancellations, no shows or if the meeting finishes early.

Additionally, with enterprise-wide insights into how their meeting rooms are being used, management and facility caretakers are also able to improve meeting rooms in relation to how meeting rooms are being used.

On top of that, we presented HESTA’s employees with a mobile interface, which means they will be able to check the availability of a room in real-time, and they can book it directly from their phones. To make the process of finding a room for a spontaneous meeting far more efficient, we’ve made sure that the digital panels next to each room light up in green when the room is available and red when it is occupied, to make sure that meetings aren’t interrupted by colleagues searching for an available room.

Do you face the same challenges as HESTA?