Reinventing meetings & saving space

I think I would be really hard pushed to find anyone on the planet who wouldn’t like to attend fewer work meetings.

Complaints about ‘meeting overload’ and the trials of a day of back-to-back meetings must echo around offices across the globe.

But there could be a answer in sight…

The concept of shrinking the office and doing away with meeting rooms is starting to take hold.

The concept is simple. Create more areas where people can congregate and hold discussions, and cut down the number of meeting rooms needed.

I know of at least three new buildings featuring floors linked by open stairways and ‘tea stations’ where people can catch up with one another.

And I know of a case where an organisation went to the extent of cutting a hole through the middle of several floors of offices to create an open stairway and spaces on each level to enable unplanned, on-the-go meetings to occur.

There are many efficiencies with this approach. There is less need for scheduled meetings, which boosts productivity, and as the need for meeting rooms diminishes the cost savings on space increases.

These ways of working suit the modern workplace as more and more organisations struggle with the old-fashioned designs and layouts of the past.

Opening up spaces helps an office building become a village where people involved in a wide range of activities can meet up informally, in common areas, and the flow of people and their conversations happen naturally as they might in a village square.

Contrast this with separate villages miles apart, connected only by road, similar to the traditional separation of work spaces by floor, closed rooms and connections by elevator.

The approach to reducing the number of meeting rooms fits the practice of Activities Based Planning, or “Driver Based Planning” which is gaining increasing currency as a method for reducing resource use and managing the true drivers of corporate financial success.

In some businesses, the traditional ‘annual budget’ is done away with, and planning and budgeting processes become a consumption-based approach reflecting the relationship with an organisation’s demand for activities and resources.

Flexibility in work cultures, work spaces and work budgets is the new name of the game.