If you’re in charge of the workplace experience, you probably hear this more than anything: "We need to justify the spend." Whether it's a tool, a redesign, or something as seemingly small as a meeting room tablet, ROI is the first and last question in the room.
Now, let’s talk about meeting rooms. You already know they’re one of the most frustrating parts of office life. Double-bookings. No-shows. Wandering the halls trying to find a free room. And when you're the one expected to fix it—or worse, justify why it's worth fixing—it can feel like you're solving a problem no one sees until it’s a crisis.
Here’s the reality: meeting rooms are expensive real estate, and the way most companies use them is wildly inefficient. According to a
CBRE workplace report, average meeting room utilisation hovers around just 30–40% in most offices.
And it’s not just about empty space—it’s about wasted time. According to
the Harvard Business Review, unnecessary or poorly managed meetings cost companies $37 billion (that’s right! Billions with a B) in lost productivity annually, often due to inefficient scheduling and underutilised meeting spaces.
Further supporting this, research published in the
Journal of Organizational Behavior found that meeting quality significantly impacts perceived work time waste, with poorly scheduled or unnecessary meetings leading to disengagement and reduced efficiency.
If you factor in the ripple effects of ghost meetings, blocked rooms, and last-minute rescheduling, it's easy to see how teams lose valuable time each week. For a team of 100, even modest delays or room-finding struggles can quickly add up to hundreds of lost hours monthly, time that could be better spent doing meaningful work.
If you want to see the REAL cost of ghost meetings, we covered this in a
previous article.
What Stakeholders Want to Know
So, how do you make the case for better meeting room tech, especially when budgets are tight and every expense is under the microscope?
Here’s what leadership wants to hear:
- What are we losing by not fixing this?
- How much will this save us in time, space, or costs?
- Can it integrate with what we already use?
When talking to stakeholders, focus on what matters to them:
- Quantifiable savings: How much money the business loses on underutilised rooms, delays, and ghost meetings.
- Time efficiency: How many hours employees could get back with better meeting room booking tools
- Integration readiness: Whether the solution plays well with existing systems like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace.
- Data-backed space planning: The ability to use room analytics to make smarter, cost-saving decisions.
- Employee experience: Every delay or double-booking chips away at morale and productivity.
You’re not pitching tech—you’re presenting a fix for wasted space, wasted time, and unnecessary cost.
Let’s talk about Solutions
This is the part where we will tell you how Door Tablet is more than a digital sign on a wall, it’s a full meeting room management system that solves the meeting room booking pain points everyone deals with.
Key Features That Matter:
- Room Availability at a Glance – Meeting room tablets light up green when a room is free, red when in use. No more peeking through glass walls or interrupting meetings.
- Tap-to-Book – Book a room directly from the tablet or from your existing calendar platform (Google, Microsoft 365, etc.)
- Auto-Cancellation for No-Shows – If no one checks into a meeting within a set window, the system frees the room. Ghost meetings? Gone.
- Real-Time Syncing – All bookings update in real-time across devices and calendars, eliminating double-bookings and guesswork.
- Analytics and Insights – See which rooms are used, when, and how often. Optimise space or reconfigure underutilised areas based on actual data.
- Wayfinding Displays – Get a clear view of what’s happening across the office and book any available room right from the lobby, no need to wander the halls.
- Nearby Room Booking – Use each display to find and reserve nearby available rooms instantly.
- Motion Sensors – Enable smart automation and enhance privacy by detecting actual occupancy, reducing booking conflicts and unnecessary interruptions.
How to calculate the ROI
If you're preparing to pitch a meeting room solution to leadership, it's worth framing your case in numbers. Here's a simple framework you can use to calculate the ROI, and tie it directly to what Door Tablet helps unlock.
Step 1: Start with space costs
- Estimate the cost per square foot of office space (e.g. £100/sq ft in central London).
- Multiply by the average size of your meeting rooms (e.g. 300 sq ft).
- Calculate the annual cost per room.
- Estimate underutilisation percentage (e.g. 30% unused = £9,000–£13,500 wasted per room/year).
Step 2: Factor in time lost
- Estimate the hours employees spend per week dealing with scheduling issues, delays, or room hunting (e.g. 2 hours/week × 100 people = 10,000 hours/year).
- Multiply by your average hourly salary rate (e.g. £30/hour = £300,000/year lost).
Step 3: Project potential gains from meeting room tech
- Auto-released rooms: If a 300 sq ft room costs £30,000/year, recovering even 20% of its unused capacity could project a gain of £6,000 per room annually.
- Time saved: Saving 1 hour/week per employee (valued at £30/hour) projects to £1,560/year per person. For 100 employees, that’s £156,000/year in potential productivity.
Use this structure to show what’s at stake and how meeting room tech directly drives business value.
Final Thoughts
If you’re part of a workplace experience, real estate, or IT team trying to advocate for better meeting room tools, talk about the lost hours, not just the shiny screens. A meeting room booking system like
Door Tablet doesn’t just help meetings run on time—it helps the business run more efficiently.
Want to see it in action? Visit
door-tablet.com or get in touch for a
demo.