As college and university budgets tighten, efficiency has become more important than ever. There are plenty of budget-saving opportunities across campus. But one often overlooked aspect of the process is the room usage of your meeting spaces. What can focusing on room scheduling considerations give your university?
More efficiency in this area can go a long way toward maximizing the functionality of the spaces. It can also help teams save cleaning and energy resources and find rooms that may be repurposed as office space and other specific needs. A well-run booking process can also save staff time through real-time availability checks and other automatic capabilities.
At its core, room bookings impact students, faculty, and campus operations alike. But because of these complex audiences, creating a process that accommodates everyone’s needs and leads to more informed decisions also becomes inherently complex. Understanding these manifold needs can help you create a better plan for space management, especially by finding a software solution that can manage the process.
Understanding Room Scheduling Needs for Universities
From the moment students step foot on campus for their onboarding and orientation experience, they’ll likely have a need for space. That’s before we even consider the need for classroom space, room availability for external visitors, and more. A comprehensive understanding of your classroom and workspace scheduling needs can help simplify resource management and workflows.
Balancing Academic and Non-Academic Usage
Any focus on room scheduling considerations naturally starts with classrooms. But don’t underestimate other spaces on campus. For example, academic and administrative offices comprise nearly 20% of available rooms on most campuses. That’s before considering conference spaces, meeting room management, and other needs.
In addition, colleges and universities are increasingly moving towards more flexible systems that accommodate both academic and non-academic usage. Floor plans and seating arrangements are designed to become more flexible, requiring space utilization strategy adjustments that accommodate academic and administrative stakeholders.
Reservations for Students, Faculty, Administrative Staff and More
Any conference room and meeting room booking strategy needs to account for requests from a variety of audiences. Plan for these room scheduling considerations:
- Faculty will need to schedule space classrooms that accommodate their teaching needs. Key features may include projectors, whiteboards, video conferencing opportunities for hybrid classes, and more.
- Students will look for spaces that help them meet more easily, often without much advance notice. These plans require last-minute options in your room booking system as a result.
- Administrative staff will need a conference room scheduling option that integrates with their calendar systems, like Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar.
- Event coordinators will require a system with at least some level of permissions and access control. This will ensure more straightforward visitor management when conference attendees or other constituents come to campus.
The work environment of the rooms to be scheduled, in other words, differs based on their purpose and audience. An intuitive system for the room scheduling considerations of each of these audiences becomes crucial.
Room Type and Purpose
Finally, any strategy and system needs to account for the different types of rooms and their purposes on campus. Lecture halls, labs, meeting rooms, and social gathering spaces will all have very different needs. In fact, an engaging campus life requires the physical spaces across these and other purposes to be both efficient and effective.
Similar to the audiences, each room type will have different scheduling needs. Disruptions in social spaces are probably less concerning than they would be in a high-level meeting room or lecture hall. In-person and hybrid work will also require different room types. A room scheduling system and strategy that accounts for these nuances becomes crucial.
Key Considerations for University Room Scheduling
Given the above nuances, implementing a more strategic room reservation effort is crucial. These six room scheduling considerations can help you get there.
1. Using a Room Reservation System
Classroom and meeting room scheduling is inherently complex. This is why universities like USF publish comprehensive studies based solely on space and room utilization needs. With manual process management almost impossible, a space scheduling solution streamlines the scheduling process and improves space utilization across campus.
This is where Concept3D’s new room scheduling solution can become a key solution to a common problem. A user-friendly interface will enable your university to accommodate all of your audiences’ space needs. Ultimately, you can optimize your scheduling and booking process across students, faculty, and staff.
2. Establishing Room Scheduling Policies
Beyond the technology that addresses multiple room scheduling considerations, your institution can also benefit from creating a clear room scheduling policy that ensures fair and efficient use of the university spaces. Everyone needing space should understand details like:
- Where and how to book
- What to do in case of a meeting or class cancellation to ensure the space opens up again
- Who will be responsible for cleaning the space
- And more
Cornell University’s space scheduling policies offer a great example of clearly outlining requirements and responsibilities.
3. Capacity and Utilization
When creating a room scheduling policy, efficiency is key. That means understanding the maximum occupancy of each of your rooms (and room types) and measuring your underutilized spaces to determine where better scheduling could benefit the university. That process is complex but can go a long way toward ensuring that everyone has the space they need when they need it.
4. Accessibility
Any efforts to manage spaces on campus have to include accessibility needs. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, nearly 20% of undergraduate students have a disability, and the numbers are likely similar among faculty and staff. Room scheduling should not just account for double bookings or scheduling conflicts but also provide a clear outline of the accessibility of each space. Room displays that show steps or other potential concerns, for example, can help to ensure inclusive use of spaces for all students and staff.
5. Technology and Equipment Requirements
Of course, any effort to create effective room scheduling and workplace management also has to account for the specific technology and equipment needs of various audiences and to support various needs. Conference rooms will have different needs than classrooms, media studies classrooms will differ in their needs from mathematics classrooms, and so on.
Clear outlines of what each room entails need to be part of the scheduling process and system. This step will ensure that everyone who books a room (or gets booked into a room) receives the space they need.
6. Maintenance
Finally, don’t underestimate the importance of keeping the rooms that various campus constituents need in good shape. Maintenance schedules, from cleaning to technology check-ups and upgrades, must be part of the larger consideration to ensure that spaces remain functional and well-maintained over time. It’s the only way to ensure that a strategy and plan for space usage put in place this year will still be just as efficient and functional two, three, and five years down the road.
Why Invest in Room Scheduling Software?
Given the complexities in audiences and considerations, efficient space planning is nearly impossible without room scheduling software. Find the right system, and it can help you build and execute your plan in a variety of ways:
- Make scheduling a room easy and intuitive for all of your audiences, whether it’s a last-minute request from a student group or a larger classroom plan for the semester from the registrar’s office.
- Keep a real-time view of room availability at a central level for important meetings and other more high-priority needs while avoiding double bookings.
- Save time and budget by ensuring that your rooms across campus are used as efficiently and effectively as possible. This includes the ability to take action on strategic space considerations based on information from the system.
- Create a better campus experience for your students, faculty, and staff, who can more easily find the space they need and benefit from advanced features like notifications to remind them about a scheduled room.
These benefits make room scheduling software a great investment for any college and university looking to improve how it manages its campus spaces. That is, of course, as long as you can find the right system and software for your needs.
Use Concept3D for Managing Your University’s Room Scheduling Considerations
When looking for software to help with your scheduling system, you need an expert with extensive experience in higher ed—especially regarding the physical footprint of your campus. Complex audiences, needs, and considerations require that expertise and more.That’s where Concept3D comes in. Thanks to expertise gained by longstanding products like our interactive campus maps, our partnership can also help you optimize your room scheduling.