You've been preparing for your presentation for days. Your whole team will be there and you spent hours on your deck, right down to painstakingly finding the just-right gifs to introduce some fun into the process.
On the day of, you show up prepared to launch into it, only to find the room's been double booked. So much for all that hard work. You've wasted time putting together a presentation you can't show, your team has lost time showing up for one that's no longer happening, and no one gets the benefit of your insights (or your killer gif game).
Chances are, your organization already has the tool you need to keep this from happening again. While you know how to use Gmail, Drive, and the basic features of Google Calendar, you may be overlooking the features available for resource scheduling in Google Workspace.
Google Workspace is already a centralized platform that keeps everyone in your organization connected. But it's not just good for enabling communication and collaboration, you can also use Google Workspace to manage availability and scheduling for your company's physical resources.
That can include — but isn't necessarily limited to — buildings, meeting rooms, company vehicles, and related equipment like projectors, monitors, and navigation systems.
Resource scheduling in Google Workspace gives you an organized way to keep track of any resources that need to be reserved in advance. Moving the scheduling process for these assets within Google Calendar means that every employee can easily see resource availability in real time, and reserve any resources they need in the same place where they organize the rest of their schedule.
Within Google Calendar, you can create a resource calendar for each shared resource your company offers. Each resource calendar will then integrate seamlessly with Google Calendar, ensuring that users can easily pull up resource details in a tool they likely already use every day.
Google Workspace's resource calendars provide the functionality to:
Having this functionality built into Google Calendar means employees have easy access to it, while people outside the organization don't — simplifying security concerns. And employees will intuitively know where to look when it's time to book a reservation, keeping the whole process streamlined and easy.
Having a centralized platform for resource scheduling can improve planning, efficiency, and asset management at your organization. Used properly, Workspace resource scheduling can:
If you're sold on using Google Workspace for resource management, here’s how to start creating resource calendars. While signed in to an administrator account, navigate in the Google Admin Console to Menu > Directory > Buildings and Resources > Overview.
Workspace treats buildings as the foundational unit for your resource calendars — your other resources will each be attached to the relevant building. In the Resource Management section, select Open > Manage Buildings > Add new buildings. Then start filling in the details for each building, including the name and address.
Pro tip: If your company has a lot of real estate, you can speed this process up by using the bulk upload feature. You can also use bulk uploads for resources and features.
For each building, add all relevant resources that can be reserved, like rooms and vehicles. Think now about how best to handle naming conventions, so it’s easy to intuitively add new resources later. The resources will be attached to a building, so you shouldn't need to specify the building or city in the name, but think about any descriptive features employees would benefit from seeing at a glance, like size information and what floor it's on (e.g. 2nd Floor Conference Room Large Group, or 6-person Group Van).
Fill in more relevant details about each resource by adding audio, video, or other features included. That could be items like projectors and monitors for conference rooms and navigation systems for vehicles.
Once your resource calendars are created, share them with employees and set proper permissions. First, add your resources to your My Calendars list by opening Google Calendar, choosing Other Calendars > Add > Browse resources, then selecting your resource. Then, from the My Calendars list, select your resource and choose More > Settings and sharing. From there, you can specify access permissions and choose whether to share the calendar with everyone in the organization, only specific individuals, or select organizational units.
Having your resource calendars set up and accessible to your employees is a big step. But you also want to establish strong policies and make use of Google Calendar's features to make the reservations process as smooth as possible.
Setting up resource scheduling in Google Workspace can solve some of your problems, but you're still likely to face a few challenges you should aim to be prepared for. Some issues that may arise include:
Things don't always go as planned, and sometimes that applies to resource reservations. A planned meeting may not have enough RSVPs to move forward, or maybe the group decides to move to virtual to include traveling colleagues. For whatever reason, a certain number of ghost bookings is inevitable.
But too many, and it can wreak havoc on your resource availability. Encourage employees to be rigid about canceling reservations when plans change. And keep an eye on recurring bookings — when set up to be ongoing, they can become a common culprit for ghost bookings.
Sometimes people leave or change positions in the organization, and it can be all too easy to forget something like transferring ownership of a resource calendar in the process. But you need an admin to maintain access to your resource calendars, even through employee turnover.
Make transferring resource calendars part of the offboarding process, so you don't risk losing events and reservations when an employee leaves.
You may not want to make every resource available to every employee. With some resources, you need to consider security concerns, such as if sensitive materials are stored in the room. And for resources that are especially high value or in demand, you may want to place limitations on who can reserve them.
For example, you might not want to trust just anyone in the organization with a vehicle that would be costly to replace, so that could be a resource where you turn off the auto-accept feature.
Getting specific in the permissions you set up for select resources can help you put some protections in place, and monitoring bookings to keep an eye out for security concerns can help you further reduce risk.
Google Workspace can be a powerful tool for helping you manage resource scheduling in an organized way, but it still has limitations. By pairing Workspace with gPanel, you can further simplify your organization's resource scheduling processes. gPanel by Promevo helps you achieve:
Managing resource scheduling and access is one of many tasks IT admins have to juggle. You want to ensure employees have the access they need to company resources to do their jobs effectively, without it costing IT any more work and time than necessary.
Using the combo of Google Workspace and gPanel can make things easier on you and other employees alike. You gain control over managing resource calendars, can set permissions, and gain visibility into how employees are using the resources.
Meanwhile, employees gain an efficient, intuitive process for determining availability and reserving resources. You can reduce the conflict of double bookings, and keep all these functions centralized in one main view. It’s a win-win for all involved.
If you haven't tried gPanel yet to see all the extra functionality it can unlock in Google Workspace, it's a good day to start.