On average, employees spend 392 hours per year in meetings. Divide that number by eight hours, and that equals 49 workdays spent in meetings. That’s almost 50 full days out of around 260 working days yearly in meetings. While that number might seem steep, if these meetings are productive, efficient, and valuable, they benefit a company and its employees. Paramount to a useful, effective meeting is for a planned meeting to occur in the first place. That might sound like an overly obvious statement, but booking a room only for nobody to show up is a growing epidemic in today’s hybrid workplace. Modern office environments must maximize every square inch of functional space. Conversely, booking a meeting only for everyone to no-show—or ghost—means a missed opportunity to leverage your space to its fullest capacity, amounting to a ripple effect that hampers the entire business.
What Are Ghost Meetings?
No-show and ghost meetings are similar, except that a ghost meeting means absolutely nobody showed up. So, when someone books a meeting in a conference room and not a single person meant to be there attends, including the person who booked it, you have a ghost meeting. While ghost meetings sound—at first—like a minor inconvenience, their impact has more widespread consequences if they continue to occur without being remedied. More to the point, statistics indicate ghost meetings are a growing problem, with 30% of meeting room bookings turning into ghost meetings, wasting space, time, and resources. However, ghost meetings primarily result from poor meeting scheduling practices, such as failing to cancel unnecessary recurring meetings. For instance, someone might book a recurring meeting every Thursday from 9:00 AM to 12:00 PM for a project team meeting, but once the project is over, the room booking remains. This makes the room unavailable for others who might need it during that time, even though there is no actual meeting happening.
Are Ghost Meetings Actually That Much of a Problem?
It’s impossible to avoid ghost meetings happening once in a while. Someone's bound to forget to cancel, or attendees choose Zoom instead of a conference room for the sake of their remote colleagues. With that being said, ghost meetings become a significant issue when they’re a recurring trend. A meeting room is a critical resource and a central point for talent and leaders to share ideas, establish critical directives, and forge difference-making partnerships. Tying this space up with a ghost meeting means you’re not utilizing it effectively nor getting the most out of it. Ghostings also hamper operational efficiency due to last-minute rearrangements, scheduling conflicts, and accessibility/availability disruptions for other teams.
Ghosted meeting rooms also devour costs. Organizations invest in office spaces to harness communication and collaboration. No-shows lead to the wastage of that crucial and expensive resource. You’re pouring money into something that’s not getting utilized, generating financial losses of up to $300,000 per year for some organizations. On top of everything else, repeated problems with ghost meetings will damage employee morale. The lack of gathering spaces resulting from no-shows causes frustration. It stifles discussions about core functionalities, making for a problematic slippery slope. Suddenly, employees become less engaged as their satisfaction dwindles due to the lack of appropriate workspace. While these issues are frustrating, solutions like PJS Systems’ AV installations exist to overcome the problems that lead to ghost meetings.
Audio Visual Services in Vancouver
At the end of the previous section, we boldly stated: Our custom AV installation for meetings can enhance efficiencies and offset ghost meetings. We weren’t blowing smoke either; PJS Systems’ AV installation services for corporate offices will remove the issues that lead to ghosting.
How?
First and foremost, we understand the growing prevalence of hybrid work in high-growth business environments. Two-thirds of such organizations operate using some form of hybrid work. In other words, we operate based on the knowledge that coordinating and running efficient meetings with hybrid team members at the office, at home, and on the road can be challenging. We tailor our AV installation services for corporate offices that need a flexible and reliable hybrid collaboration strategy conducive to efficient meetings. Our technology streamlines communications in meeting spaces across multiple offices and remote environments, driving productivity while minimizing operational costs.
Where do ghost meetings (and eliminating them) fit into all that?
Simple. Hybrid work environments, while meeting employees in the middle, are conducive to the ineffective meeting management that drives ghost meetings. For instance, employees often book a room but end up working remotely and no longer require it. Or, they’ll book but choose to meet at desks, on Zoom, or in another common area instead. Our AV services at PJS Systems reduce ghost meetings because we implement robust room booking systems to handle the challenges of today’s hybrid work environments.
Custom AV Installation for Meetings and Video Conferencing
Many advantages stem from PJS Systems’ custom AV installation for meetings and video conferencing, such as:
The high-quality video conferencing and audio solutions we install ensure crystal-clear and effective communication.
Our installations eliminate lag or static in video conference rooms, so everyone involved can hear what’s said, remaining engaged and attentive.
This hybrid-work-centric technology brings vibrant, engaging meetings to your team members instead of vice versa. No need to worry about delays, downtime, or technical snafus that hamper productivity and disrupt progress.
These features make a critical difference for companies like yours, but do they eliminate ghost meetings? Undoubtedly, they foster well-run meetings, giving your team members the impetus not to skip. Yet, ghost meetings stem from far more complex issues than the propensity for downtime or problems with lagging. Most glaringly, as we said in the previous section, ghosted conference rooms have more to do with ineffective meeting management. Thus, beyond our exceptional AV functionality needed for dynamic, engaging meetings, we double down with a robust room booking system. This pivotal tool features occupancy monitoring technology bolstered by Zoom and Microsoft-powered advanced analytics, providing facilities and IT managers with real-time data on the utilization rates of their meeting rooms. It ensures recurring meetings that are no longer needed are identified and canceled, keeping rooms available for those who truly need them.
Are You a Vancouver Business That’s Tired of Ghost Meetings? PJS Systems is Your Answer
Meetings aren’t for ghosts—they’re for top-performing professionals looking to brainstorm, collaborate, and help grow your business. These productive outcomes fail to occur when perpetually ghosted conference rooms run rampant in your workplace. Fortunately, PJS Systems’ AV installation services, specifically our robust room booking system, will ensure you get the most out of your meetings by drastically reducing no-shows. Contact PJS Systems today to learn more and vanquish ghost meetings once and for all.
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