Making meeting rooms and visitors easier to manage with Clearooms
Focus Independent Adult Social Work is a Community Interest Company providing adult social care and statutory social services on behalf of North East Lincolnshire Council. It works closely with health and social care partners to support adults to live as independently and safely as possible.
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- Consumer Services Industry
- 12 Meeting Rooms
- 192 Users
Making meeting rooms and visitors easier to manage with Clearooms
Originally introduced to support desk booking during the COVID-19 pandemic, Clearooms has evolved into an important part of how Focus Independent Adult Social
Work manages its meeting rooms and visitors. The organisation replaced a clunky, calendar-based system with a simple visual platform that staff quickly embraced.
Today, Clearooms helps teams find and book rooms, manage external visitors and training sessions, and provide clear information about room availability across the office.
“Everyone absolutely loved it because of what we were having to deal with before. It was a vast improvement.”
ASHLEY JARVIS, Marketing & Digital Communications Manager, Focus Independent Adult Social Work.
BACKGROUND
Focus Independent Adult Social Work is a Community Interest Company providing adult social care and statutory social services on behalf of North East Lincolnshire Council. It works closely with health and social care partners to support adults to live as independently and safely as possible.
With around 160 staff, Focus operates from its offices in Grimsby and welcomes a wide variety of visitors, from professionals attending training to families and people using its services.
The organisation needed a more effective way to manage shared workspace and meeting rooms, while also providing a better experience for staff and visitors.
THE CHALLENGE
Focus originally used a Microsoft calendar-based system to manage its meeting rooms. It was difficult to see which rooms were available and cumbersome for staff to use.
The organisation was initially looking for a desk booking system during the pandemic, but quickly recognised that Clearooms could also provide a much better way to manage meeting rooms.
The solution needed to:
- Make room availability immediately visible
- Support different room requirements and facilities
- Make external meeting invitations straightforward
- Provide a way to manage visitors
- Be affordable and proportionate for a publicly funded organisation
- Be simple enough for internal teams to administer
THE SOLUTION
Focus found Clearooms through its search for a desk booking platform and selected it following a demonstration.
Functionality and value for money were key considerations. Rather than paying for a large package of features it did not need, Focus was attracted to Clearooms’ flexible approach, where it could select the resources it required.
The platform has since become primarily a meeting-room management tool. Staff can view rooms through different interfaces, see availability and select rooms based on specific requirements such as air conditioning or whether windows can be opened.
Clearooms also integrates visitor management into the booking process. When a staff member is expecting an external visitor, they can add the visitor’s details to the booking, with invitations and arrival notifications handled through the system.
“We’re really, really enjoying it and using it... it’s really, really useful and helped us a lot.”
ASHLEY JARVIS, Marketing & Digital Communications Manager, Focus Independent Adult Social Work
FUTURE PLANS
Focus is looking to make greater use of Clearooms’ visitor-management capabilities – moving fully to a tablet-based system to reduce the reliance on paper while improving information governance and making visitor information easier to manage.
As the organisation continues to use more of Clearooms’ functionality, it has a flexible platform that can adapt to its changing requirements.
The Results
Clearooms has become an established part of Focus’s day-to-day workplace management
Implementation was straightforward, with Focus creating its own floor plan from existing office drawings and configuring the rooms internally.
The organisation also introduced display kiosks to show room availability around the office, giving staff an immediate visual indication of which spaces were occupied.
Adoption was rapid, with no significant resistance from staff. The change represented a substantial improvement over the previous calendar-based approach.
Clearooms has also proved flexible as Focus’s requirements have evolved. The organisation has used custom fields to identify the facilitator for training sessions, making it easier for visitors arriving for a particular course to find the person running it.
Given the nature of Focus’s work, visitor management also has an important safety dimension. Visitor numbers can range from a handful on a normal day to more than 50 during training events, with visitors including health professionals, carers, families and service users.
- Improved visibility Staff can immediately see which meeting rooms are available
- Easy adoption Employees embraced the system with little or no resistance
- Flexible room selection Rooms can be identified by specific facilities and requirements
- Simpler visitor management Staff can register expected visitors and notify them when their host is available
- Better meeting administration External attendees can receive meeting invitations directly through Clearooms
- Clearer communication Display kiosks provide live information about room availability
- Low support requirement Focus has needed technical support only occasionally, with issues dealt with promptly
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