Good Design Alone Won’t Eradicate Mindless Meetings
Johnathan Sandler
Image © Wendy Andrew-Doele
Most of our recent workplace designs have dramatically increased the amount of meeting space available to the client. This happens not only because our clients usually ask for such increases, but our utilization studies tend to substantiate the need for more meeting areas. In many ways, building a case for more meeting spaces in the modern (frequently more open) workplace is easy. Yet there is a larger underlying question that goes beyond simple space issues: what type of a collaborative culture is an organization trying to foster? More cool and tech enabled meeting rooms are usually a good thing, but more meetings are usually not. In the research we do—the surveys, focus groups, interviews and other studies—a typical refrain is that there are too many meetings and many meetings are “a waste of time.”
