Discovering the Perfect Conference Room Size
Instead of offices, Shutterstock decided to have an open-floor plan with long desks and 50 conference and "pop-in" rooms--which are spaces for impromptu meetings or set aside for department heads to bang out work when privacy is needed. "This is what we needed, data isn't going to tell you everything," he says. "I had an office in our last space and I felt too closed off from people. I like how people can approach me here."
But to figure out how big the rooms needed to be, Oringer used--you guessed it--data. An employee figured out how to mine everyone's calendars to calculate how often they used the conference rooms and how many people generally attended the meetings. "We initially thought there were more larger-sized meetings, but it turned out we were wrong," Oringer says. "A lot of the meetings that were happening are usually two-, three-, or four-person meetings. We ended up cutting the size of larger conference rooms for smaller ones."
He then crowdsourced themes and names for the rooms from every employee and they were put to a vote. One game room, dubbed "Alice in Wonderland," features big white leather couches, black and red molding, Alice in Wonderland artwork on the walls, and a flatscreen TV with Sega's Dreamcast and two arcade games. The other game room, called "8-Bit," has a Ping Pong table and the walls are painted with scenes from the Nintendo video game Super Mario Brothers.