Are meetings the biggest wasted cost for businesses?

How often have you found yourself diving into an empty meeting room that is shown as being pre-booked? You say - “let’s grab this meeting room quickly, if someone comes along we’ll find another”. It’s all too common in office spaces, and there's a very real reason for this.

Our meeting room software, Synergy SKY CONNECT, identified that 30% of meetings result in no-shows. These no-shows aren’t simply down to employees just skipping the meeting, the top likely reasons for no-show meetings were:

• Postponing the meeting
• Prior meetings running late
• Another venue being used

The underlying issue with all of the above? Meeting rooms are booked and not canceled on the system. These meeting rooms become wasted valuable space.

Taking into consideration that on average, some 90% of an 8-hour day has meeting rooms fully booked, these no-show meetings are potentially costing businesses a huge price every year.

Synergy SKY CONNECT wasn’t created to showcase the fact that your employees aren’t using meeting rooms that they’ve booked out, but instead, our aim is to highlight where costs to the business could be optimized, as well as streamlining, managing, and analyzing both online and offline meetings. With our auto room release option, unused meeting rooms can be freed up easily for others to take advantage of the available meeting space.

For businesses located in top cities worldwide, New York topped the list for the annual wasted cost due to no-show meetings, followed closely by London and San Francisco.

The below takes into consideration the average meeting room size of 30m² and one meeting room for 20 employees to calculate the annual wasted cost of meeting no-shows.

The math is easy - start today.

Sources:

• CBRE
• Statista
• BNP Paribas