Facilitate on-site meetings & events with Internal Spaces

While many companies have issued back to office mandates, an engaged workplace remains a difficult feat for most.

That’s why we’re excited to announce our new feature: Internal spaces.

With this new service, Planned clients can now enable their teams to book internal meeting rooms from anywhere. Streamlining the booking process for medium and large meeting rooms, we’re helping people bring life back to their offices.

Maintaining employee engagement is a struggle

Over the last few months, we’ve heard the same thing from clients: office space is underused. Attendance and engagement are not back to what they used to be.

Workplace teams are looking to:

• leverage the internal spaces they are already paying for
• make it easier for anyone in the company to book rooms for meetings and events
• keep track of room utilization and attendance

And Google Calendar isn’t cutting it. Companies need photos and details of internal spaces to help employees choose appropriate rooms that suit their needs.

It’s not necessarily that people don’t want to choose internal spaces: they may not even know where they are and what they look like. After all, with so much remote and hybrid work, many people are unfamiliar with the office.

We’ve designed it so that someone with zero planning experience can comfortably navigate their offices with the Internal spaces feature.

The Planned solution: facilitate onsite social events

Because our mission is to help companies bring people together, we’ve created a feature that facilitates ongoing internal, in-person events.

Essentially, your office spaces will be listed on the platform in a similar way to the other event venues on our marketplace - but only visible to people in your company of course.

Everyone in your company will have access to every internal room, encouraging the use of internal bookings rather than costly external venues. In other words, this feature helps cut unnecessary costs and create the connection we all crave.

Key features include:

Your C-suite will have all the visibility and control they need

• Track meeting room utilization and event activity across your entire organization
• Track spending by department and supplier type
• Get complete oversight to approve spending and booking flows

Employees from anywhere can navigate the office with ease

• Help remote teams book meetings rooms from detailed listings, with pictures and 3D mappings
• List amenities and room capacity
• Find and book available rooms in just a few clicks

Elevate the in-person on-site experience

• Team activities, brainstorm meetings, office parties: you can book it all on Planned
• Book AV material, catering, and entertainment from the same platform
• Keep budgets under control with preferred vendors list and company-discount deals

Popular use cases

From San Francisco to anywhere in the world, which office/city is better for me?

Based on your event brief, you will be provided with options of cities and offices, such as whether the company’s UK or New York location would be best for your event.

What if I need catering and entertainment for my internal event?

Our marketplace has a ton of high-quality vendors for all your food and beverage, audio/visual, and entertainment needs. With the Planned guarantee, you will receive 3 curated options to choose from within 4 days — simplifying your search, saving you time and money.

How much oversight is required from office managers?

The necessary oversight can be tailored to your company’s needs. Whether you want office managers to manually approve everything, or if you want to enable instant booking, the choice is yours.

The ROI in question: The impact of in-person events on employee retention

With office events, you achieve ROI through employee retention and higher office space amortization.

85% of employees say they’d go into the office more for a chance to socialize with colleagues. Which means that not only does this features saves venue rental fees, it also minimizes the high cost of hiring.

And this is also true for remote first companies. In 2020, Dropbox adopted a “Virtual First” policy while rebranding its offices as “studios” and limiting how its staff could use them. Employees are encouraged to use studios for intentional gatherings, like brainstorming sessions, community-building events and socializing—in other words, events. After all, it's easy to treat yourself to great snacks at home, but you'll never get to bond with your colleagues from your home office.

At Planned, we strongly believe that a successful workplace is a social workplace. And that’s the vision driving our product roadmap.

If you’re interested in seeing how our Internal Spaces feature would look like for your company, our team is happy to give you a tour. Book a call here!