Is Outlook obsession holding you back? Here’s how your business can go for growth with meeting room booking software

In less then a decade, we’ll be turning up to video conferences as holograms, according to a report by Scott Wharton, a video collaboration expert.

He told the Yale Insights website: “Video conferencing won’t be nearly as good as being there – it’ll be better.”

But is your organisation already at risk of falling behind because you are still obsessed with using Outlook?

It’s not a good idea. Video conferencing helps teams from across the world to work with their clients, creating high collaboration at a relatively low cost.

Your distributed teams can work 24/7 effortlessly and move your company forward with ideas and high productivity.

But for this to happen, you must be able to schedule and book meetings in a range of locations and time zones easily.

You can do that in Outlook, it’s true. But it’s a complicated and time-consuming process that is open to human error, which slows you and your organisation down.

Worryingly, it could be doing this every single day.

So what’s the best way to create perfect meetings in multiple locations and time zones?

We can compare the experience using just Outlook and using up-to-the-minute meeting room booking software.

The ‘just Outlook’ experience

In Outlook, making bookings across a number of locations and time zones is a time-heavy, complicated task.

You need to:

1. Open the calendar
2. Go to options and then scroll down to the time-zone section
3. Tick boxes for a second or third time-zone and select locations
4. Return to your calendar
5. Click and select ‘new appointment’ at the time appropriate to where the main host will be
6. Click ‘scheduling assistant’ and search for an available room in that main location. Keep opening room calendars until you see a room that is free at the time you want
7. Choose first room
8. Repeat the search for second and third rooms, applying the correct time-zone each time
9. If there’s no availability at the second or third locations that coincides with the first room, repeat the process with a new time
10. Then check attendee availability to ensure everyone can attend
11. If anyone is unavailable, you need to find a slot that works for everyone – and repeat the room search
12. Then you invite all three meeting rooms to the meeting and all the attendees
13. Click send
14. Cross your fingers – and hope no attendees suggest a different meeting time

This booking process takes an average of 30 minutes.

For EACH meeting.

When your company grows, the number of meetings held increases, so you end up dedicating employees completely to meeting admin.

But you can still only manage up to three time-zones.

The meeting room booking software experience

With an enterprise-level meeting room booking software here’s what you do:

1. Open the calendar
2. Click and select ‘new appointment’ at a time relevant to where the main host is
3. Choose ‘room booking solution’
4. Choose ‘multi-room booking’
5. Add as many locations as you need – it’s unlimited
6. Choose locations from the drop-down menu – the time-zone for each is displayed
7. Click ‘Find’
8. Click ‘free/busy’
9. See if attendee and room availability for each location match
10. Select the rooms required and click the book button
11. Sit back – you’re done

Booking this way takes 2 minutes on average

For someone organizing 10 multi-location video conference meetings each month, meeting room booking software saves over 4.5 hours.

Not to mention the burden of carrying out repetitive, boring and unnecessary admin tasks…

Video conferencing = well-being + retained talent

Organisations need to work hard nowadays to hang onto talented people, and most businesses want to provide working environments with well-being as a priority, where people can get on with their jobs, without boredom, frustration or delay.

Collaboration tools such as AV and video conferencing are nothing short of miraculous when it comes to creating the conditions for innovation and productivity. They are also great in bonding teams together across distances, reducing frustration and promoting happy working.

They reduce an organisation’s carbon footprint, too, and reduce travel costs, saving workers time sitting in traffic jams.

It’s great when it works efficiently – but it has also been shown that staff can shun these modern meeting methods if they are hard to organise.

So here’s the result:

You could be slowing down the actual geographical growth of your business by making it hard to create perfect meetings – and affecting the collaborative power and productivity of your workers.

You could even be making your people frustrated at work by allowing ‘just Outlook’ to put admin in their way.

And in 10 years, when holograms are getting together to talk business, your organisation won’t be joining the party.

So here’s the question: if you want to grow, can you really afford to let using ‘just Outlook’ put the brakes on?

Or should you book a demo of Rendezvous meeting room booking software immediately – before it’s too late?