Last-minute meetings are an inevitable part of the working day.
However, when the message comes in to ‘jump on a call’, finding an available meeting room is usually limited to looking around the office and using whatever looks available.
This leads to overlap and interruptions from colleagues who have booked into that meeting room for a similar time.
Asking people to move meeting rooms or being unable to enter one despite having booked it out, causes disruption at best and, at worse, comes across as unprofessional to those you’re on a call with.
Our Find a Room feature is built to be instantaneous. Find and reserve a meeting room minutes before the call is about to take place.
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Find a Room is a meeting room feature. It displays a list of meeting rooms, and the times in which they are available at the start of each day.
Officely Find a Room is integrated with Google Calendar, so all room availability is accurate even if it wasn’t booked out through the Officely app.
Users simply click on the room and time they’d like to book out. If a time isn’t available, it means the room has already been booked.
How can I find Find a Room in Officely?
Find a Room is in the Officely home. Head to your Officely app within Slack, and click on Find a Room, this will open the list of meeting rooms available.
When a last-minute call comes in, your priority is to answer that call in an appropriate environment — without disturbing other office members or the person on your call.
To do this, you usually need to get into a meeting room ASAP, which is how overlaps occur.
Here’s how Find a Room has been built to avoid those awkward overlaps and interactions:
You don’t need to jump between apps and tools to search for and book a room. You can head straight to the Officely app within Slack and book your room out for however long you need, seconds before the call comes in.
It’s Integrated With Your Google Calendar
Many Office Managers already use Google Meeting Rooms as a way of booking rooms within the office. With this resource already set up and ready to go, we found its main problem to be the ease-of-use when needing to book a room last minute.
By integrating with your Google Calendar, Officely uses the information to map out your existing meeting rooms and their availability. The meeting rooms displayed on Find a Room contains bookings from both Google Calendar and Find a Room, so there’s no messy overlap when you want to take a call.
At its core, this is why we built Find a Room. We wanted a meeting room system in place that was so simple and easy, employees have no excuse not to book into their meeting room in advance.
While Google Calendar has recurring and advanced meetings covered, Officely Find a Room is built for those last minute calls. Availability (and lack of) is displayed even if your team used GCal to book out the room three months in advance.
If it’s in your Google Calendar, it will be in Officely, and that’s what allows your employees to rest assured when they dash into a meeting room that it really is available.
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As we’ve discussed, most workplaces already have a system in place for booking out meeting rooms in advance.
If you have a team meeting every week at 11AM, the chances are most people in the office will know not to go into the allocated meeting room at that time.
However, if a customer asks you to quickly answer some questions, your priority is to take the call, not spend ten minutes searching Google Calendar to find out which room is available.
We’ve integrated with Google Calendar to give our users the best overall experience. With Officely, you can book out a 10AM meeting room at 9:59AM, while with Google Calendar you can ensure your recurring meetings remain uninterrupted.
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Yes, Find a Room is only available for our paid users.
2. Is Find a Room compatible with other calendars?
Right now, Find a Room is only available to integrate with Google Calendar. This is due to the syncing and integration process between both apps — however, we are looking at the possibility of expanding this in the future.
Officely Office Managers (admins) will need to connect Officely with the Google Calendar. Officely will then display the meeting rooms setup in Google Calendar with their available times. Learn how to set up a meeting room on Google.
4.How do I find and use Find a Room?
It’s found within our Find a Room tab. Follow our Help Center article on how to get started and useFind a Room
5. How far in advance can I book a meeting room with Officely?
Find a Room becomes available at the start of the day, it is only available for same-day bookings.
6. Why do I need to give authorization for Officely to access my Google Calendar?
We know giving permission to another app can seem daunting. However, Officely needs authorization to access current meeting rooms assigned within Google Calendar. This is how we can ensure no meeting rooms are overbooked.
7. Is there a limit to how many meeting rooms I can create?
No, you can have as many meeting rooms on Officely as you do in your office.
8. Are meeting rooms allocated within Neighborhoods?
Yes. Each Neighborhood has its own Find a Room tab, so you can create different meeting rooms for each office space.
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What is Hybrid Work? How Your Business Can Adopt the Hybrid Work Model
As more businesses balance working between the office and home, we explain how and why to build a hybrid work model that suits your organization.
Alice is Officely's content manager. When not spreading the word of Officely and hybrid work, you can find her feeding family, friends and strangers with her latest baking experiment.
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