

“We’re spending how much on meeting spaces?” Sarah, an office manager at a mid-sized tech company, stared at the quarterly report in disbelief. Despite investing in premium office space and modern booking systems, meeting room chaos still reigned. Teams complained about space shortages while entire floors sat underutilized.
A meeting room audit provides the insights needed to transform workspace efficiency, whether for a startup’s first office or multiple corporate locations. By tracking how your rooms are used, what technology works (and what doesn’t), and how people book spaces, you’ll get a clear picture of your meeting room reality.
This guide breaks down the essentials of meeting room audits – how to track usage, understand your true costs, and gather data that actually matters.
A meeting room audit is a comprehensive evaluation designed to assess the efficiency of your workspace. It goes beyond simply counting how many meeting rooms are available—this process dives into how these spaces are utilized, the performance of technology and equipment, and how booking systems support team workflows.
Meeting rooms eat up a massive chunk of your operational budget, but most businesses miss the full financial picture.
Direct costs are the easily identifiable expenses associated with meeting room operations. These include:
Beyond the obvious, hidden costs represent inefficiencies that can quietly impact an organization’s bottom line:
This baseline data helps identify disparities between available resources and team needs.
For more accurate data collection, leveraging tools like Joan Room Booking can simplify the process by integrating with your existing booking system and providing detailed usage metrics. With this, you can easily identify peak demand periods, underutilized spaces, and areas for improvement.
P.S. If you want to dive deeper into this process watch our webinar: “You Don’t Have Enough Meeting Rooms, But You Actually Do.”
Your expensive 20-person conference room keeps hosting 3-person meetings. It’s like using a bus to drive one person to work – wasteful and expensive.
Solution: Split that oversized space into two smaller rooms. Set up booking rules that match room size to attendee count. Watch your space efficiency double overnight.
Every room has different tech setups. Team meetings turn into tech troubleshooting sessions because no one knows what they’re walking into.
Solution: Standardize your meeting room tech. Same video conferencing system, same cable setup, same control panel in every room. When people know what to expect, meetings start on time.
Your calendar shows fully booked rooms, but walking past, you see them sitting empty. Recurring meetings that no one bothers to cancel are eating up your space.
Solution: Set up ‘use it or lose it’ rules. If someone doesn’t check in within 10 minutes, the room goes back into the pool. Joan Room Booking makes this seamless – the sleek display outside each room shows real-time availability and lets people check in with a tap. No check-in? The room automatically frees up for others to book. Plus, the clear digital display means no more confusion about whether a room is actually available.
The insights gained from a meeting room audit provide a clear path toward improvement, helping businesses address inefficiencies, enhance employee satisfaction, and ensure their spaces are working as hard as their teams do. From identifying underutilized spaces to standardizing technology and refining booking workflows, the opportunities for transformation are immense.
If you’re looking for expert guidance on how to conduct an effective meeting room audit or want personalized tips to optimize your space management, contact our Joan Workplace professionals today.