AIRICA Blog

Efficiency in facility management thanks to intelligent rooms

Written by Airica AG | Feb 4, 2022 9:45:22 AM

Indoor air quality is one of the main tasks for health-conscious facility management. With intelligent solutions, you create perfect conditions for efficient working and learning as well as for the well-being of your employees.

Empty meeting rooms and bad air – not optimal working conditions

In many medium-sized and larger companies, regular meetings and gatherings of employees are part of the normal office routine. Facility management is often the responsibility of an internal department that takes care of space planning. If meetings are not properly coordinated at this point, there is a risk of vacancies or overbooking. If the indoor air is not constantly checked, the air in the room is completely used up as soon as it is entered.

In order to achieve good results when working in meeting rooms, an optimal room climate is a decisive prerequisite. At the same time, sufficient ventilation should be provided during the meeting to maintain good working conditions. Especially when several people are in the meeting room, the air deteriorates with increasing duration.

Optimized use of space in facility management is essential for pleasant and performance-enhancing working conditions for employees. The intelligent systems from Airica ensure professional monitoring of the room air and provide you with a permanently good climate.

 

How do you achieve optimal working conditions with intelligent facility management?

To ensure that the meeting rooms in your company are used optimally at all times, intelligent meeting rooms are important in addition to well-thought-out planning and good management in order to obtain continuous feedback on the working conditions. Well functioning facility management should answer these questions:

  • How do you plan the equipment for your meeting rooms?
  • How do you manage the use of meeting rooms?
  • How can you measure and regulate air quality in meeting rooms?
  • How do intelligent measurement systems help you to operate the meeting rooms optimally?
  • How are meeting rooms used and how are they utilized?
  • How can meeting rooms be optimally allocated to users (number, type of activity)?
  • How can unused meeting rooms be automatically canceled?

Only if you succeed in mastering these challenges with suitable measures will you be able to get the best results for the use of your meeting rooms. The employees in your company will find perfect working conditions and your facility management will make a positive contribution to your business.

 

Meeting room planning

When planning your company's meeting rooms, space efficiency is an important factor. With high space costs in mind, meeting rooms should be planned according to your needs. In this context, the number and size of the rooms should be precisely matched to the number of your employees. In addition, good ventilation through windows or air conditioning should be ensured. When planning, consider the utilization of the rooms so that the existing capacity can be well ventilated before the next group enters the meeting room.

Part of good facility management is equipping the conference rooms with suitable equipment. Especially the technical equipment should meet the requirements of your business. In addition, when equipping the room, care should be taken to ensure that the furniture can be used for multiple functional purposes. You should also think about the health of your employees by offering ergonomically shaped seating

Meeting room management

Meeting room management involves more than just recording the date and time where employees use a room. A meeting room that is too large means wasting important resources and is economically unviable. The available rooms should be optimally occupied so that not too many employees attend a meeting. In contrast, ghosting should be prevented. These are booked meetings where no person shows up and the booked meeting room remains unused.

Your facilities management should have smart solutions in place to keep your meeting rooms at optimal capacity throughout the year. For example, there are apps that can be used to conveniently view available room capacity quickly. This allows you to call a meeting at short notice and book the free rooms immediately. Conversely, it is possible to use technical aids to determine when a booked room is not being used. This gives facility management staff the option of immediately releasing unused meeting rooms.

 

Intelligent meeting rooms

During a meeting, the conditions in meeting rooms are constantly changing. Especially when there are a large number of people in the room, the quality of the air deteriorates with increasing duration. By taking regular coffee breaks, it is possible to ventilate a meeting room several times. However, this results in interruptions of the meeting or, if the window is open, an increased noise level from outside, which impairs the ability of the participants to concentrate.

Modern facility management offers intelligent solutions that are able to monitor the air in the meeting room and automatically indicate necessary measures if required. This ensures an optimum indoor climate that is conducive to performance and has a beneficial effect on employees. At the same time, the course of the meeting is not interrupted and leads to an efficient result.

Measuring the number of people

In order to make the best use of meeting rooms, it is important to know if the number of people in the meeting rooms matches the planned capacity.

The focus here is not only on whether there are too many people in a meeting room, but also whether a meeting room was booked without anyone showing, or a meeting room being used that was not booked at all.

With the help of intelligent sensors, facility management can remotely determine how the meeting rooms are being used and where action has to be taken.

Measuring air quality

During a meeting, it is an important task of facility management to measure and permanently monitor the air quality in the interior. Radiated body heat and the unavoidable emission of carbon dioxide from the air breathed by those present at a meeting rapidly deteriorate the quality of the air, especially in smaller rooms. This has an impact on the performance of the employees and thus on the work results of the conference.

As part of modern facility management, there are systems that can determine the air quality in real-time. In this way, participants receive continuous feedback on the state of the room climate. At the same time, solution suggestions are displayed as to how the indoor climate can be optimized. Such a system is based on the findings of health research. It combines health-conscious work with the convenience of an intelligent solution.

Automatically cancel meeting room reservations

A booked but unused meeting room is a facility management nightmare for your business. It affects the productivity of your business because an unused room is a cost. At the same time, other departments may be waiting for a free room that they would like to use for a meeting.

To avoid ghost meetings in your business, a smart system that automatically cancels unused reservations is a wise purchase. For example, a sensor inside the room detecting if it is being used. This means that the available room can immediately be reported as free again and can be used by other employees in your company.

 

Conclusion

Meetings are an important part of a successful business. Well-equipped and professionally managed meeting rooms are an important part of conducting these meetings.

Smart meeting spaces provided by efficient facilities management are the foundation for effective meetings. A smart system that senses the number of people in the room and signals when rooms are empty ensures the greatest possible efficiency.

Intelligent meeting rooms that measure air quality and immediately indicate the need for correction, such as the AIRICA system, perfectly round off efficient facility management.