People rarely have anything positive to say about meetings, except that they’ve ended. Some people who are trying to improve meetings, mainly by moving them out of the spaces that have been developed to support them (conference rooms), have been getting press attention recently.
On September 1, Paul Sullivan (“When Office Meetings Leave the Office Behind”) discussed alternative meeting locations in The New York Times: “some business owners have instituted activities that may seem better suited to summer camp – outdoor planning sessions, meetings in a salt room, deal talks on a surfboard. They may sound fun and relaxing, but they are meant to be productive.”
Wacky as some of these meetings may sound, there’s scientific support for sometimes ditching conference rooms.
Studies have shown that walking is good for thinking, whether we do it inside or outside, but outside walks, when they happen in nature and/or near water can also help de-stress us and restock mental energy that’s been depleted by focused thinking. And nothing runs down stocks of brainpower faster than working to resolve a difficult issue with a group of other people. Outdoors is also always naturally day lit, which all by itself provides a cognitive and emotional boost. Creating spaces that are jam-packed with natural light is now a design standard and so is “landscaping” with plants and water features, indoors and out.
Building in separate spaces for more challenging meetings – for example, for creative thinking and having special/important conversations with others – signals to users that successfully solving thorny problems, etc., is important to the organization paying for those spaces. Scheduling a meeting for one of those areas sends nonverbal messages that makes successful meeting outcomes more likely, just as going offsite to resolve an issue does.
Sometimes meetings are moved out of conference rooms to build some variety into a team’s life, and science tells us that that variety is also desirable. Nicolai, Klooker, Panayotova, Husam and Weinberg (2016) report that “team performance can be fostered by the change of the team’s workspace location…teams did not only change the location of their teamwork based on the stage of the innovation process stage they were currently working on;…They quite often changed their spatial setting as a means to ignite their creative potential and therefore team performance. Quite often the teams went to seek a space that seemingly offered them the opposite…to the current state [for example, from more contemplative to more action-oriented spaces].” And, for good measure from the Nicolai lead team (2016): “it seems that creativity was fostered when teams…transformed [a space] it to make it their own…A space that fosters creativity… suggests a direction of usage but also leaves room to change it.”
So, while we might debate the value of spending time in a salt room, research has clearly shown that creating opportunities for walking meetings and building in a variety of team spaces, for example, can improve team performance.
Claudia Nicolai, Marie Klooker, Dora Panayotova, Daniela Husam, and Ulrich Weinberg. 2016. “Innovation in Creative Environments: Understanding and Measuring the Influence of Spatial Effects on Design Thinking-Teams.” In H. Plattner et al. (eds.), Design Thinking Research, Understanding Innovation, Springer International Publishing: Switzerland, pp. 125-139.
Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.