MEETING EXPECTATIONS

is not as pronounced as public perception: offices are only 40% full from Tuesdays to Thursdays. Across the week, occupancy is at 34.3%, compared with 15% in early 2021.

“Let’s not romanticise 2019, though,” says June Koh, total workplace partner at Cushman & Wakefield. “Building occupancy has always been much lower than people thought. Pre-pandemic occupancy was only ever 60-80% for a variety of reasons, such as holidays, sickness and external meetings.”

Workers are going into their offices less frequently, and this reduced frequency has changed what they do when they get there. Julie Ennis, CEO of corporate services at Sodexo UK & Ireland, believes that this change in rationale for going into the office should be woven into how the space is configured for meetings. Internal meetings between colleagues are increasing, particularly in a hybrid format with some physically present and others joining via video connections. Microsoft recently reported that the number of videoenabled Teams meetings each week has more than doubled globally for the average user since the start of the pandemic.

This rise is reflected in meeting room data across the UK. Richard Bostelmann, an account manager for Anabas, oversees the offices of a creative agency client. Here, says Bostelmann, meeting spaces are now at 90-95% capacity across the week, apart from on Fridays.

Lewis Beck, head of workplace EMEA at property management agency CBRE explains that use of meeting rooms at the company’s headquarters is currently at 70%. “But at peak times it’s at 100%, as most meetings tend to occur between 10am and noon, and 2 and 4pm.”

Beck says CBRE clients are experiencing similar issues: “There is a lot of friction. It is hard to organise coming into the office without any calls at all. Sitting in an open-plan office can get very noisy and frustrating.”

Louise Rushmer, workplace experience director at property management firm Cushman & Wakefield, says employees are expecting their workplaces to change, just as they too have had to change their homes to accommodate work in recent years. “They are expecting more space to take those meetings now. Otherwise, why come into the office at all?”

Ennis explains: “We have seen this trend with many of our clients, where the purpose is now of connecting and collaborating with colleagues. If you can design spaces around this purpose, you are more likely to see individuals wanting to return and use your workspace.”

Making ends meet

Many organisations have reacted to new hybrid realities by increasing meeting space volume, largely at the expense of individual workspaces and banks of desks. CBRE’s headquarters in London provide a useful indication of what is happening.

The proportion of space dedicated to desks has fallen from 65% to 32% of floor space. Meeting space has risen from 12% to 20%, while wider collaboration space – such as open-plan soft seating – has increased from 12% to 25%.

It is a similar story across the firm’s client base. CBRE has collated data on the building space it services, covering a headcount of 1.1 million. These spaces saw an 8% year-on-year increase in space dedicated to collaboration in 2022.

Adaptability of furniture, fixtures and fittings to allow for more meeting space when it is required has become a design requirement, says Beck.

“Flexibility in office space design is crucial. Being able to make changes relatively easily, without material change in the building, allows you to continually adapt to how you’re working.”

This newly required versatility is a key consideration at one of Bostelmann’s agency clients, too. Here, there are at least two floors, previously furnished with banks of desks, which have been stripped out and turned into creative collaboration spaces that can be configured depending on meeting types, be it internal collaboration, pitches to external clients, or meetings with new business partners. “The single-person booths here are not as popular,” adds Bostelmann. “Perhaps that’s because it’s a more creative environment.”

Experts, however, warn against launching into significant changes to floorspace, even if it is more furniture-based than structural, before gaining a full appreciation of its impact. Beck points to the acoustics of collaborative areas, which can create a lot of disruptive noise, particularly if the space is near individual work stations.

Ennis recommends refraining from enacting any suggested changes for at least three months. “Since most people find change challenging, you need to wait for any new behaviours and ways of working to settle in, rather than reacting in a knee-jerk manner.”

The cultural dimension

Businesses and employees alike are trying to replicate meeting practices newly established in the last few years. But how to calculate the right balance? There is a new cultural dimension, says Koh.

“Physical spaces haven’t caught up to hybrid working,” she says. “It’s still brick and mortar; it takes time to change. But neither has human behaviour caught up to the hybrid working environment. A lot of clients have experimented with more meeting pods, and they get brilliant feedback. But should they add more? Probably not. It doesn’t make sense to have 100 people come into your office every day to spend 80% of their time on calls in these pods. You run the risk of building 100 separate offices, or cubicles. You can’t just think about redesigning the space without changing behaviours or processes.”

The problem of matching meeting room demand to capacity has a strong behavioural component. Poor behaviour – such as booking a meeting room and then not using it, or booking a larger room than required – is commonplace, and at a managerial level, bloated calendars packed with recurring meetings instigated during the pandemic have remained, perhaps unnecessarily, in place.

These behavioural problems are nothing new. Workplace heads were fielding complaints about a lack of meeting room space way before the pandemic hit. Corporate real estate association CoreNet published a report in 2014 about a global bank that suffered from remarkably similar problems: 33.2% of desks sat empty, 44% of meeting rooms were booked and not used, while 70% of meetings for one or two people were held in rooms for six to 10.

The wholly new component is hybrid, with the locations of any group of meeting participants, and the constantly changing mix of home and office attendees, exacerbating these existing meeting etiquette problems.

Ennis says video calls in a typical hybrid working day also fail to take into account one element that remote work had eradicated – the commute. Calls are often back-to-back, resulting in a dash to another meeting room, or spread to the edges of the working day. “This puts more pressure on the end employee,” she says.

Taking back control

Research from Harvard Business School suggests teams and organisations should conduct a meeting “audit” to strip back packed calendars, establishing how each one contributes to a team’s objectives – in other words, whether the meeting has a purpose.

Some firms are empowering employees to decline meetings; some have a blanket ban on scheduled meetings on a particular day. Others have banned the organising of meetings above a certain level of attendees. When a meeting survives analysis of its value, organisations could encourage teams to meet in their collaborative spaces.

Beck says that to persuade people to have fewer meetings “you need your organisation to get better at distributed work.”

Collaborative technology already allows users to work on documents and projects in this manner, particularly useful across time zones, or when hybrid working locations are mixed. Explains Beck: “Asynchronous communication like this helps to reduce reliance on face-to-face communication and real-time engagement.”

Impact on FM provision

Of course, any change in meeting space use has an impact on how FM teams deliver services. Booking tech performs a central role here. As Beck explains: “You need to ensure it’s as easy as possible to book, and check into, a meeting room – and have the ability to release those bookings if no one turns up.”

Rushmer concurs: “Any booths added to your space need to be bookable in order to be effective. This is a vital part of FM service delivery.”

Ensuring meetings are held in the same part of the building when not at full capacity makes both energy use and cleaning provision far more efficient, while sensor data linked to occupancy can also help to organise cleaning rosters.

Firms are also using ‘heat mapping’ to understand office worker movements via access control and other means to decipher whether reallocation of space from individual desks to collaborative meeting space would be beneficial. On-site FMs can also add some important additional nuance, with Koh describing FMs as their organisations “covert agents of change”, able “to observe and nudge behaviour”.

Bostelmann, meanwhile, warns of some of the pitfalls of technological reliance in meeting room space. “There’s some great technology out there, but it doesn’t always work for you. We trialled technology which took a snapshot of what a meeting room should look like. When the heat map noted that it was empty, it took another snapshot and highlighted chairs out of place, or a coffee stain on the carpet, and the sensor sent a report back to the help desk. There were two issues here: firstly, the snapshots of the room potentially contained confidential notes. Secondly, our meetings are so busy that we would get a report every time.”

Instead, Bostelmann uses his logistics team, known as ‘floor captains’, who patrol the space. They will ‘reset’ meeting rooms back to a minimum standard.

“That, in turn, drives subliminal behavioural improvements,” says Bostelmann, explaining that if a room’s occupant sees a dirty coffee cup on the side, they are more likely to add to that collection of crockery.

Front-facing

Perhaps the biggest impact on FM service delivery is with front-of-house. Lorna Landells, real estate consultant at Remit Consulting says that post-pandemic, businesses and individuals are more confident about holding meetings with external guests, customers and clients –but their expectations in managing this experience have changed.

For Beck, the issue is one of client comfort. “We have put a big emphasis on having a concierge and a very client-facing aspect to our building, encouraging our clients to come and spend time working in our building,” he explains.

Bostelmann has also seen a steady increase in visitors. “We get fewer of the one-to-one meetings, but significantly more larger meetings on-site.”

An influx of external visitors to use meeting space could be a taste of the future, as organisations begin to move away from traditional, individual workspaces, in favour of more meeting and collaboration spaces.

Reports vary, but a survey of more than 250 businesses across London and the

South East by real estate consultancy Lambert Smith Hampton indicated last year that firms were looking at reducing their office space by 20% or more. HSBC, for example, has already reduced the space it occupies in its Canary Wharf Tower by 25%, and recent reports show that the global bank is now seeking to relocate its London headquarters to a building less than half the size of its current headquarters.

It’s a shift that meeting space providers are seeking to exploit. American company Convene acquired UK provider Etc in February in a circa £200 million deal because Convene believes “the future of the workplaces is a meeting space”.

For Rushmer, the lesson for FM is the need for it to become a more human-centric, visible service. “We are now focused on the internal and external customer journey,” he says. “It has become important to remove any pain points that impact people negatively. High-quality service is key.”

As they have become accustomed to in recent times, workplace leaders need to be ready and willing to learn and adapt as workplace practices evolve. The easiest way to do that? Have a meeting about it.

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