The Meeting Room With a View
Imagine all the exciting meetings that can take place in this room?!
Earlier today I spent a precious half hour of my billable time trying to set-up a meeting. Now we all know how much fun meetings can be: they’re a great way to meet new people, indulge in a free cup of coffee, ask irrelevant and often rhetorical questions before leaving early enough not to get any actions assigned to you. However, setting-up a meeting shouldn’t have to be a painful exercise. You get onto Outlook, add invitees, chose a meeting room, check availability, perhaps tweak the time a bit to suit your internet surfing habits and then you’re done.
But not today. Today, trying to book a meeting was about as difficult as trying to get the French to work a forty hour work week. The year’s only just begun and people’s diaries are already booked out. An hour is all I need and the first opportunity I can find based on their schedules is the 29th of January! What can these people possibly be doing this early in the year, apart from trying to impress their colleagues at how busy they’re pretending to be and of course, irritating me?
Further investigation (read intimidation), proved that the guilty WLBs’ (Work-shy, Lazy Bastards) schedules were about as empty as a list of interesting things about Gordon Brown. To “catch-up” they’d booked out their diaries with an all-encompassing entry called “Work” starting at 08:30, finishing at 16:30, everyday for the next two weeks. Amateurs! If you’re going to fake your diary entries you’re going to have to be a little more creative than “Work”! There’s always “Strategy Session”, “Project Prioritisation” and the ever reliable “Performance Review” to substitute for goofing off. And 08:30 to 16:30 is so predictable! You’ve got the mix the times up; a two hour workshop here, an hour team meeting there and maybe even forty five minutes for non-existent travel. I leant the latter from an attorney. 99% of attorneys give the other 1% a bad name.
The second challenge that I faced while struggling to set-up my meeting was trying to get a decent meeting room. There are many factors that influence your choice of meeting room, including obvious ones such as the number of people it can accommodate, availability of a screen, projector, flip chart, white board, working white board pens, that sort of thing. But there are other more subtle reasons for choosing a particular meeting room – a nice view, effective air conditioning, comfy chairs and proximity to the flatscreen TVs so you can check the cricket score in moments of boredom. Some organisations have floors dedicated to Executives, which means any meeting on their floor comes with lunch and snacks, which are always a good idea. An old client had a rule that you could ask for tea, coffee and biscuits to be served at your meeting only if an external party was attending. As we were consultants, we deemed ourselves to be external parties which meant biscuits all year round. It’s the little things that count, even if they are tiny, soggy ginger biscuits.
The names that companies give to their meeting rooms offer an interesting glimpse at their corporate culture. The bland (read Swiss) name their rooms efficiently, combining the floor number and the room number, starting in the northwest corner, proceeding regimentally round the building in a clockwise fashion. South African companies are quite keen on using our flora and fauna to christen our meetings rooms, which does raise an eyebrow when you’ve got back-to-backs in Buffalo, Bush Baby and Bougainvillea.
When another client moved into a new building staff were asked to suggest names for the meeting rooms, with the winning suggestions receiving a prize of dinner for two at an average restaurant (any restaurant that has ice-cream and hot chocolate sauce on its menu). I suggested Bart, Homer and Crusty the Clown, but for some unknown reason didn’t win. Other suggestions included Saturn, Jupiter and Mars (I’ve always wanted to go to Mars for a meeting); Silverstone, Monaco and Imola (you guessed it, suggestion from a grand prix nerd) and Sarbanes, Oxley and GAAP (those goofy auditors).
And the winning meeting room names were… and I promise you this is true: Vision, Mission and Values! Go figure.
The best meeting room names I’ve come across are Steam Room, Hotel Room and Leg Room. No surprise here: advertising agency.
Now, if you’ll please excuse me, I have a Performance Review at 09:00.
