There are multiple ways in which you can manage meeting rooms at your office. The most common room types used in medium to large office environments are Drop-in rooms, Bookable rooms, and Blocked rooms. Each one has their own benefits. Flowscape's room booking solution allows you to freely select and change between room types through the Admin Portal. In this blog post, we will go through each room type in more detail.
Drop-In Rooms
Drop-in Rooms are typically smaller meeting rooms used for quick meetings with 1-2 people. These are usually called Chat room or Phone booths. Drop-in rooms are non-bookable to allow usage after need, and to have options for the employees if they need a room ad-hoc.
Because Drop-in rooms are non-bookable, Room Presence Sensors are needed to indicate if the room is occupied or not. Busy Lights can be added outside the meeting room to create a visual indication of availability.
The optimal number of drop-in rooms needed at your office depends on the number of employees and the nature of your business. Where they should be located also depends on if you have a completely open office space or separate zones based on departments. Certain departments, like sales or support, are typically in bigger need of drop-in rooms.
Bookable Rooms
Bookable Rooms are typically medium size to large meeting rooms with 3 seats or more. These are usually used for longer meetings that are planned in advance but can also be booked upon arrival if longer collaboration sessions are needed. The advantage with having bookable rooms is that it allows employees to plan in advance and simultaneously have a guaranteed meeting spot.
Bookings can be made through the Flowscape app, webapp, directly on a room panel outside the meeting room or through outlook plug-in. By booking a meeting room using outlook plug-in, all meeting attendees will have the meeting appear in their booking schedule in the app, which enables everyone to quickly find the location.
Because the rooms are bookable, availability of the room is shown directly on the map so there is no need for presence sensors, the only solution needed to start room booking is the Flowmap. However, many of our clients still use presence sensors to indicate if someone is located in the room without a booking, or to enable advanced utilization analytics.
Blocked Rooms
Blocked rooms can be any room in your office that you want to mark as non-usable. This can be due to renovation, equipment errors or other problems. The rooms are shown as grey on the map and will not be bookable. When the room is usable again, it can be turned into a bookable room through the admin portal.
Using Blocked rooms can create clear and visual indication of which meeting rooms that are actually available, so employees can avoid booking an unusable meeting room by mistake. You only need our Flowmap to enable blocked rooms.
Combining Room Types
It is easy to combine and change room types if needed. But its important to remember that hardware is necessary to create the best possible experience for your drop-in rooms. To allow complete flexibility, we therefore recommend installing Room Presence Sensors in all your rooms. This allows you to analyze actual usage and monitor if booked rooms are actually used or if you have a lot of ghost meetings. If you have large meeting rooms, we recommend using people counter sensors instead.
Room Panels are a great complement to allow employees to see all bookings for the day directly outside a specific meeting room. The Room Panels also give a clear color indication to the room’s availability. Combine Room Panels for your bookable rooms and Busy Lights for your Drop-in rooms to have clear and visible color indication for all meeting rooms at your office.
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