From Boardrooms to ZoomRooms:
Rethinking Meeting Spaces
Face-to-face public meetings have lasted since before the ancient Roman and Greek forums, through various technological evolutions, and even a few pandemics through history. It’s been documented (The Mehrabian Formula) that 55% of our communication is body language, and 38% is the tone of our voice, leaving only 7% of what we say are coming from our words. This suggests we aren’t receiving someone’s full spectrum of communication through video calls, and certainly not when the camera is turned off.
The impact on business communication could mean we won’t feel fully connected to others we are meeting virtually — whether for positive or negative feedback. We may need to rethink workplace meeting room design to be optimized as a hybrid of physical and digital multi-modal interaction. The days of traditional boardroom-style meeting rooms may soon be in the past.
How We Got Here
The conventional meeting room is designed so members can sit in a line on either side of a central table, facing each other. With presentation material on the short wall at one end, people turn their attention between the screen and each other. This design has evolved over the years to include newer digital technologies, yet the overall model of the room has remained. This design model is founded on the efficiency of space and furniture, rather than an ideal experience for human interaction.
A New Paradigm
The pandemic has certainly accelerated the use of virtual meetings, online training, and conference seminars. A hybrid of virtual attendees with physical, in-person meetings should be expected as the new normal. When it comes to design, we will consider the influences in room size, layout, and furniture styles that can make the meetings more engaging and seamless for all parties involved.
For example, we have found that workplaces will require a higher quantity of 8-to-10 person meeting rooms, as this is the average number of physical attendees for most meetings, while other groups will attend virtually. Rooms of this size will be used to host large functions, and may require more technology (such as multiple display screens).
The room designs won’t be governed by efficiency, but for the experience in technology and activity. By breaking conventions, we can optimize the interior design for better collaboration experiences, and adaptable technology. Here’s a look at some ways we might see meeting room designs change:
Less is More (Individual Booths)
The individual private booth is becoming more popular, with many more furniture brands offering this solution. With higher pressures to join multiple calls, this offers an undistracted place for virtual collaboration and focused work between online meetings. What will change is that booths will no longer be co-located together in one zone, as was conventionally done in workplace planning. Instead, they will be sprinkled about in seemingly randomized, yet convenient places, filling the in-between spaces of the open office. Employees will need visual access for availability and be able to immediately jump into a booth to join an audio/video call.
Huddle Up! (Small Team Collaboration Areas)
4-to-8 person huddle rooms are statically the most used rooms in the workplace. With the right layout and technology, this room size offers a high degree of flexibility and functions, especially for small teams to join virtual meetings or collaboration sessions.
The latest technologies, such as large digital writeable screens (such as MaxHub or Microsoft Surface Hub), and 180-degree cameras (Logitech) allow the other side to see all sides of the room, would suggest the room design to allow for more movement. This means, that smaller, more flexible furniture, along with non-centralized single lighting modes could make these rooms more effective.
Boardrooms (Large Formal Meetings)
The traditional boardroom will become more immersive and technology-enhanced. The standard large 14-to-20 person meeting rooms that will continue to serve a role in modern business. In the next evolution of formal meeting rooms, we can expect a more hybrid scenario to include multiple simultaneous presenters ( in-person and virtual ) sharing content across more than one digital presentation surface.
The Technology
THE OLD — Do you remember those expensive telepresence meeting rooms from over a decade ago, with a partially angled table set against 3 screens on one side of the room, giving the feeling of meeting in the same room as someone half way around the world. We’ve already come a long way since then.
THE NEW — We are entering a transition in technology that allows not only two sides of a telepresence meeting, but people joining from an almost infinite (depending on the software limitations) number of locations, all contributing. Higher definition camera technology is advancing to track people as they move about the room and auto-zoom on speakers. We can expect digital surfaces to be on multiple walls, or the flexibility of moveable screens — instead of one presentation wall. This goes for interactive digital white-boarding features as well. All integrated.
THE FUTURE — We will likely also see the integration of metaverse meetings, which takes the concept even further. The number of members if the meeting will not be determined by the physical size of the room, and the amount of content being displayed can be determined by each member. This will likely have a large influence on the amount of physical real estate we allocate for our workplace. This is especially true for meeting rooms, as this often takes up to 25% of office space.
The Furniture
We can expect furniture to be more moveable, while still maintaining a design sense of elegance and prestige. There is still a desire for formal boardrooms to not look like classrooms, with clunky foldable training tables. We will also see furniture becoming more surface powered to reduce the need for cheap looking flip-up panels with power outlets that may not fit your large MacBook power adapter, or may not even be connected. Wires will be soon be in the past. Meeting furniture will quickly adapt to be fully wireless.
Let’s Workshop It! (Training, Classrooms, or Events)
Today’s progressive organizations are considering more efficient ways of information delivery that may not include an all-hands-on-deck training seminar, that also has a more positive impact on their business. Conventional training rooms take up a lot of interior real estate that is not getting maximum use each day, which becomes a considerable business cost. Getting the most out of these rooms will be paramount to an effective form and function of design. Multi-modal activities include:
- The Classroom — one-directional information lecture.
- The Conference — bi-directional information exchanged, centralized in the room.
- The Workshop — omni-directional discussions, converged in clusters, or diverged to the larger group.
- The Event — one-directional presentation + omni-directional exchange of discussion. active movement that is more fluid, less focused.
The flexibility of furniture, and infrastructure of audio-visual and digital technologies are vital to the design for these spaces. However, an upcoming trend we can expect is that these types of spaces will no longer be built out for many workplaces, except perhaps for headquarter facilities. In city-centric multi-tenant office buildings, a new trend of shared conferencing and event spaces are emerging. Tenants will have access, but without the need to take up valuable real estate in their own leased space. This will be especially necessary, as many training sessions or conferences will happen online, greatly reducing the frequency of large groups of people gathered in training rooms.
Making the change to hybrid meeting spaces are central to the future of workplace design. Rooms may no longer be rectangular, with four walls and a central table. All walls can be considered as digital presentation or discussion surfaces. We will need to consider the room acoustics for online calls, and integrated conferencing technology that makes it faster and more seamless to step into a room and start a team call.
“Now, more than ever, businesses are looking for technology that helps recreate the energy and connection we feel when we’re in the room together.” — Robin Seiler, Corporate VP, Microsoft
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