The empty meeting room problem: How to eliminate ghost rooms

Empty meeting rooms are a growing problem for many companies today. 

Walk through any modern office, and you’ll likely see them: pristine, empty conference rooms with the lights on and nobody home. These aren’t just unused spaces; they’re “ghost rooms,” a costly symptom of a workplace that hasn’t adapted to the realities of hybrid work.

The numbers are staggering. Industry data reveals that nearly 40% of all booked meeting rooms end up as no-shows. This isn’t a minor inconvenience; it’s a significant drain on your operational budget and a major source of frustration for employees who can’t find a space when they actually need one.

So, how do you banish these ghosts and reclaim your valuable space? The answer lies in combining smarter policies with intelligent technology.

The meeting room problem

We’re all now fully aware that our ‘new normal’ is impacting all aspects of how we use and navigate the office. This is right down to how we conduct our business meetings. The rise in remote and hybrid work led to a subsequent rise in partially empty offices. And sometimes completely empty board rooms. 

Thanks to video conferencing software like Zoom and Microsoft Teams, meetings are now as likely to happen virtually as they are in person. 

And even when a company adopts regular hybrid meetings, there will still be fewer people physically present. Meaning meeting room design can now usually accommodate fewer office chairs and a smaller conference table.  

But when companies don’t adapt to modern office meeting room realities, they’re often left with a big meeting room problem: ghost rooms. 

What causes ghost rooms?

‘Ghost rooms’ can refer to those rooms that are a shell of their former selves. In other words, rooms that people rarely use or book. In some cases, ghost rooms are more than a waste of space. Seeing meeting room tables always sit empty can also start to drag on employee morale. 

Here are common situations where ghost rooms occur:

• Recurring meeting no-shows: A weekly meeting is booked on the calendar indefinitely, but the team decides to take it on Teams one week. Without a simple way to cancel the physical room booking for that instance, the room sits empty.
• “Just-in-Case” or defensive booking: To be safe, an employee books a conference room for three hours when they only need it for 90 minutes. Or, they’ll book two different rooms just in case the number of attendees changes, tying up space that others could use.
• A mismatch in room supply and demand: Your office may have an abundance of 12-person boardrooms but not enough one-person phone booths. As a result, you’ll find a single employee on a video call occupying a massive room designed for a dozen people, leading to inefficient use of space.
• Clunky cancellation processes: If your booking system is difficult to navigate, employees won’t bother to cancel a reservation for a meeting that gets rescheduled or moves online. The path of least resistance is to simply not show up.

4 Ways to avoid empty meeting rooms

Just because your number of remote and hybrid workers is rising doesn’t mean your traditional meeting rooms have to sit empty. 

The following conference room ideas and strategies can help any company evolve to solve the empty meeting room problem. 

1. Implement an intelligent room booking solution

A clunky room booking system is a primary cause of ghost rooms. To fix this, you need a platform that makes booking and releasing a room effortless. Modern workplace management software allows employees to book spaces directly from their mobile app or through integrations with Slack and Microsoft Teams. More importantly, it can automate the process of freeing up unused space.

By enabling a “check-in” feature, the system can automatically release a room reservation if no one confirms their attendance within 10-15 minutes of the start time, instantly returning that room to the inventory for others to use.

2. Examine your meeting room occupancy trends—and optimize them

You can’t manage what you don’t measure. Instead of relying on guesswork, use real-time data to understand precisely how your meeting rooms are being used. By integrating presence data from IoT sensors, badges, and WiFi, a workplace analytics platform can provide a true picture of occupancy.

These insights allow you to answer critical questions:

• What is our peak utilization rate?
• Which rooms are most popular?
• Are our 10-person rooms consistently being used by only two or three people?

This data, available in an easy-to-read dashboard, is the foundation for any successful space optimization strategy.

3. Develop and communicate clear room booking policies

Technology alone isn’t enough; it must be supported by clear expectations. In partnership with HR and team leads, develop a straightforward policy for meeting room etiquette. This should be a simple guide that outlines best practices for booking rooms for the appropriate duration and group size, as well as the importance of canceling reservations in a timely manner.

An effective policy empowers employees to be more mindful of shared resources, fostering a culture of accountability.

Pro tip! Make sure your office has good wayfinding signage to help your employees and visitors navigate, especially when they’re primarily remote. 

4. Redesign and reuse underutilized spaces

Your occupancy analytics may reveal a hard truth: you simply have more large meeting rooms than you need. This is an opportunity to optimize your real estate investment. Consider transforming a chronically underused boardroom into more valuable assets that fit the needs of a hybrid workforce, such as:

• Smaller huddle rooms: Two-to-four-person rooms equipped with video conferencing tech for hybrid collaboration.
• Dedicated quiet zones: Areas with semi-private seating or pods for focused individual work.
• Modular, flexible spaces: Rooms with movable furniture and whiteboards that can be easily reconfigured for different types of collaborative sessions.

Other options for ghost rooms

Even with a good room booking system and official policy in place, many organizations will find through using analytics that they simply have more meeting spaces than they need. 

When this is the case, it makes sense to repurpose your meeting rooms. Assuming you’re using good flex room ideas, you can make changes. Turn your unused meeting space into a variety of fun and functional spaces to better support your team where they are. 

That said, even when the number of in-person meetings has been reduced, it will often make sense to maintain a hybrid meeting room or ‘Zoom Room.’ This can make it easier to coordinate meetings between remote workers and those in the office on any given day. 

In other words, if you maintain a smaller, dedicated meeting room with fewer chairs coupled with laptop hookups, blank screen for projections, and video conferencing software, your employees can have an ‘official’ meeting space that serves their current needs. 

What is the meeting room for? 

The meeting room isn’t for cramming a bunch of bored people into a shared space. It’s for creating a purposeful space that invites collaboration and innovation, and helps employees connect with each other and their shared goals. 

Meetings are about the oldest business concept going, for a reason. When creating your modern meeting rooms, look beyond the glass walls, white boards, fancy armchairs, high quality wooden tables and projection screens. Instead, create an environment that will inspire workers to connect and collaborate. A simple open space that serves employees well is better than a magazine-worthy conference room no one ever uses.  

Ultimately, the biggest meeting room problem isn’t empty conference rooms… It’s rooms that are not optimized for the people that use them. The coolest loft style or best city view won’t matter in a room that sits empty. 

OfficeSpace provides software that makes it easy to avoid empty meeting rooms, solving your biggest meeting room problems. Reach out for a free demo. 

Photos: Mariakray, Pawel Chu, Startup Stock Photos, Elevate Digital