When booking a room saves you 1.5 full time employees.
In January Timo and I were invited to spend 2 weeks, with what I would argue is Sweden’s most agile social department, working on financial aid in Rosengård, Malmö, Sweden (more on this at another time). Complaints from both social secretaries and clients had been made for some time about a very paper heavy process so the boss at this local social department simply said “why not do the paperwork together in a meeting?”
Quickly both clients and social secretaries found themselves in a way better relationship and understanding of what needed to be documented and helping each other out. The department started to move from 5 client meetings a month to the new target of 40. Changing a process like this of course has consequences and one was that the booking system became a bottle neck
The problem they are facing is that they have a limited amount of meeting rooms that are suitable for meetings with clients — 11 rooms. These rooms are used by 45 different social secretaries. To be able to check the availability they had to check each individual room, spending an average 1min 32 seconds for booking one meeting room with a client.
The sad thing about booking a room taking this long was the behaviours it promoted. The social secretaries were, most of the time, booking long time slots in the calender and then trying to retrofill these with clients, resulting many times in clients needing to take meetings that suited the social secretaries. As well as a lot of booked rooms being empty because the social secretaries had not been able to fill up the prebooked slots. The solution we ended up in changed the dynamics between the client and the social secretary who now could negotiate new time slots in the meeting instead of being assigned one. This strengthened the relationship with the clients by giving them back some control.
Booking rooms is a classical problem and there is a billion solutions out there, but you need to know what works for your process. Timo and I came in to see if we could put a new solution in place within 2 weeks. Sitting with them out in Rosengård, we lined up stakeholders and walked through the current process, filmed several social secretaries when they booked rooms, went through the statistics of when and how rooms were booked, signed up for a bunch of services on the free trial to test and tested them with the social secretaries.
The solution we landed on was a change in the configuration of our existing Office solution. We simply gave the 45 social secretaries their own room list only displaying the rooms they were allowed to use for their meetings. This list cut down the average time for booking a room with more than a minute from 1min 32 seconds to 28 seconds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4kDtsIvZAs
As this solution was very appreciated, it will now be spread across Malmö to all of our 325 social secretaries working with financial aid. They are also aiming for the 40 client meetings per month ending up in a cost saving of 1min less spent times 325 social times 45 meeting/month (incl rebooking and cancellations) ends up being 14 625 min saved per month or more then 1.5 full time employees.
