Every organization has a language that makes sense to insiders but is confusing to others. The Financial Times is no exception.
Inside its London headquarters, people don’t hesitate to say things like “Meet you at Nakfa at three o’clock” or “Why is Pataka always so cold?” Or, “Where is Nultrum again?”
That’s because most of the building’s conference rooms are named after currencies, which is a pleasant touch for a financial newspaper, although it may take some getting used to.
But since switching to mixed work, I often think it would be more appropriate to name a room “Hen’s Teeth” or “Gold Dust” or any other single word that means “very rare and hard to find.”
Finding a free conference room was difficult enough before the pandemic. But now there is no hope and more and more people are coming to the office just to meet, visit or have a Zoom call.
This is by no means just an FT issue. When I asked a man from a large multinational company how it was to find a conference room in his London building, he said: “It’s brutal.”
An executive at another large international company said it was “a nightmare.” The company had fierce competition for private rooms, and he came up with some strategies to snag one. Telling a colleague that he must keep market-sensitive information private has proven useful, as has a Zoom call with the CEO.
Then he found a secluded room behind the IT team, which was perfect except for a funny poster on the wall that said: “This way to the dance floor >–“.He would put his head close to the camera to hide it, but one day, while on the phone with the CEO of a major bank, he dropped his pen, bent down to pick it up, and exposed the poster to a shocked CEO, who roared: “Where? Earth Who are you? “
From around the world, this is definitely happening recent reports This comes from Australian workplace sensor company XY Sense, which tracks office space usage.
Anonymous data from the United States, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom and six other countries shows that walled conference rooms are definitely the most heavily used office spaces.
People use them an average of 67% of the time, compared with just 13% for cheaper, wall-less “lounge spaces,” and demand is rising.
“While our occupancy rates are lower than before the pandemic, our conference room demand is now higher than ever,” a tech company human resources executive was quoted in the report as saying. “The biggest complaint I get is, The mandate is supposed to encourage more collaboration, but sometimes there is nowhere to collaborate!”
This is no small problem. There’s no point in wasting expensive property space, but that’s exactly what’s happening with hybrid work.
The XY Sense report shows that despite workstations taking up about 80% of the floor space in a typical office of traditional design, more than one-third of desks are never used.
When Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky visited the Financial Times last week, I found out that some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley were working on solving this problem — in Pataca, as it happens. meeting room.
Chesky was an industrial designer before becoming a billionaire, and Airbnb’s elaborate headquarters was once describe Known as “the envy of Silicon Valley.”
The company launches “live and work anytime, anywhere” policy Usage in some offices declined last year. But “we still don’t seem to have enough conference rooms,” Chesky said. He noted that in the FT offices, like many others, “almost every desk is empty and almost every (meeting room) is full”.
This shows that even the smartest workplaces are designed on the principle that they need to be “totally destroyed,” he said, adding that he was addressing the issue. “Over the next year or two, we’ll be designing what we think the office of the 21st century, or at least this decade, might look like.” Despite Valley’s arrogance, I very much want him to succeed. Because if you invented the office today, you would never want what we have now.
Svlook
