The Blog on Meeting Room Management

Chances are you already know that making a good first impression is essential. Dressing up for job interviews, booking the board room for meetings with high profile clients, or carefully choosing your photo and bio for your LinkedIn page are all ways in which you might strive to make an excellent first impression.

But when was the last time you thought about the way clients and visitors experience your office space and front desks? If visitor experience isn't part of your company's discussion, it's time to bring it up. Office and facility managers fulfill many roles, but one of the most vital is making sure the office is a professional and welcoming place for long-time clients and first-time visitors. If you are looking to take a more active role in great first impressions at your company, we're here to help you start.

Don’t underestimate digital transformation. Digital transformation is enormous. Monumental. Pervading every corner of companies. Businesses are pouring trillions of dollars into it. But what is it?

In many ways, it sounds like one more business buzzword we can add to the list along with phrases like “growth hacking,” “ideation,” and “corporate synergy.” That’s because digital transformation is significant and amorphous, and means different things to different companies. But its significance should not be underestimated.

The definition of workplace security has expanded greatly in today’s digital age. Companies must not only consider employee, customer, and financial safety from external forces – fires, natural disasters, chemical spills and contamination, civil disturbances, terrorism – but also from internal forces – workplace violence, employee theft, intellectual property theft, and data theft.

There are many security risks that could happen within the walls of your office and systems. Your priority must be to provide a safe and secure work environment for your employees and visitors. By law, that means your company must provide an environment free of health and safety hazards, as well as psychological hazards.

Picture this: You prepared all week for an important meeting on Thursday afternoon. Clients have come in from out of town to attend. Partners from across the city will also be joining. In addition to the amount of time you’ve spent preparing the presentation, you spent hours searching for the right room to accommodate the number of people and technical needs, ordered catering so food arrives at the right time, and coordinated with the front desk staff each time there is a change to the guest list.

GDPR compliance is an essential factor for many companies when utilizing a visitor management platform. AskCody offers different settings in Visitor Management that allow you to respond to GDPR requirements according to your needs and context. Through a mix of existing and new features, we have you covered. To make it easier to decide, here’s a summary of actions to take.

Your front desk staff wears many hats for your company. It could be argued that this position is one of the most varied, perceptive, and all-encompassing in the organization. Depending on the size of your company, this person serves the role of scheduler, office manager, travel agent, conflict negotiator, and meeting manager. From stocking office supplies and making copies to greeting visitors as the face of the company, they keep the flow of the office running smoothly.

These days, every smart business has their eye to the future. Not just for goal-setting, benchmarking, and bottom-line growth, but for cultivating the type of office environment that serves as a lasting space for attracting top talent and allowing workers to flourish. 

We’ve gone in depth with our own 10 steps to creating tomorrow’s future workplace today, which you can read about in one of our recent blog posts. With the right amount of planning that focuses around an understanding and appreciation of the way your employees work best, you don’t have to invest millions into creating the type of future workplace that rivals that of Google or Facebook. The future, after all, is all about people. 

How often do you find yourself in front of another guest log book in a fancy office building lobby, hurriedly scribbling your name at the end of the a long list of names and times before you? Then you hand over your ID, have your photo taken, and wait as your visitor pass is printed out.

But wait, your host must have forgotten to add you to the day’s front desk visitor list because they can’t find you on the approved list. So you stand and wait while front desk security calls up to your host company.

Your meeting host is away from his desk, so you just have to sit tight until they can be tracked down. As the minutes tick by, you worry about the time cutting in to your meeting. If the meeting goes over, you’ll have to push back all of your afternoon appointments.