Meeting rooms booked out and still not being used
Press Feature
SPOR Group's acquisition of Squaredot was featured in Interior Designer Magazine on 15 September 2026. The article covers the deal itself, Squaredot's design expertise, and the combined client base the two businesses now bring together.
Here's a pattern we've seen play out again and again over 25 years of workplace design: the booking system says every room is full. Walk the floor, and half of them are sitting empty. Someone books a 10-person boardroom for a two-person call, then never cancels it. Someone else can't find anywhere to take a client call, so they don't bother trying and just take it at their desk.
It's not usually anyone's fault. It's just what happens when meeting rooms get designed around how many people a business has, rather than around how those people actually meet.
Why this keeps happening
Most meeting room fit-outs get designed to answer the wrong question. The brief asks, "How many rooms of each size do we need for the headcount?" instead of "What kinds of meetings do people here actually have, and how often?" Those two questions produce very different room mixes.
A few reasons the gap opens up:
The room sizes don't match real meeting patterns. Plenty of big boardrooms, almost nowhere for the two-person calls that make up most of the day
Booking habits outlast the room. People hold onto a familiar room "just in case," regardless of what they actually need it for
The technology doesn't match the room's real job. A boardroom kitted out for big presentations isn't much use for a quick video call, so people avoid it and default to their desk instead
Each of these is a small mismatch on its own. Together, they're enough to make a fully booked calendar and a half-empty floor true at the same time.
What changes when room planning starts from behaviour, not headcount
We recently joined SPOR Group, a workplace technology specialist that supports more than 1,500 meeting rooms across the UK and Europe and spends as much time understanding how people actually use them as we spend designing the spaces themselves.
When you can see how rooms are genuinely used, how long meetings actually run, how many people actually show up, the room mix stops being a guess based on headcount. You build the right number of small, well-equipped spaces for the calls people are actually having, fit boardrooms out for what boardrooms are actually used for, and put the technology in from day one instead of retrofitting it once people start avoiding the room.
It sounds obvious written down. It's rarer in practice than it should be.
What this means if you've got a move or refit coming up
If your booking system says you're at capacity but the floor tells a different story, it's worth asking whether your rooms were designed around how people actually meet or around a headcount spreadsheet. That question tends to explain a lot.
We've pulled together what we're seeing across the market right now, how organisations are actually using their space, where hybrid working is heading, and what's shaping smarter workplace decisions in The Dynamic Workplace 2026 Report.
It's a useful benchmark whether you're at the start of planning a project or just want to see how your current workplace stacks up.
