If you want to hear me go off on a brain dump of thoughts, one of the good ways is to ask me how to figure out how many conference rooms by size an office needs. I have sat through so many bad vendor demos of how to do this analysis that I am extremely familiar with too many bad ways to do it. Unfortunately, I am also unaware of the right way to do it.
Let us start with this rising concept of efficiency. The idea is that if you have a 10-person conference room that has 1 person using it for an hour, it is only 10% efficient. That demand should have been filled by a phone booth or smaller room to achieve a higher efficiency. I have seen this concept play out where an office with 80+% utilization of its conference rooms may only be achieving a 20-30% efficiency and be deemed poorly designed. The idea is that you can therefore build more rooms (to bring the utilization down) of smaller sizes (to bring the efficiency up) while reducing the total space being used.
Unfortunately, the world does not operate based on easy math. If you have 6 necessary client meetings of 10 people a month, you must have a 10-person room. You are dooming that room to low “efficiency,” but it is still necessary to have it. In this vein, most people are most comfortable when a conference room is just over half full. 10 people in a 10-person conference room is crowded. There is not much room for cords, bags, plates, cups, elbow room, etc.
For argument’s sake, let us assume the comfortable max for a room is 75%. This means the ceiling for “efficiency” is functionally 75%. But we know that rooms are rarely optimally used. It takes very little to drop efficiency to less than 40% simply through the nature of not every day is going to have back-to-back-to-back optimally sized meetings. An “efficiency” metric that is almost guaranteed to be under 50% no matter how well rooms are used does not seem very useful to me.
Similarly, there are many valid reasons that a 10-person meeting room may only have 1 person in it for a meeting. It could have to do with who that person is (the CEO gets to use whichever conference room they want). It could be related to the technology. It could be that no other space was available. It could be that all the other spaces were free and they simply prefer that one and it made no difference. In all of these scenarios, we know there was demand and utilization for 1 room. What we cannot speak to is whether the use of that room was efficient or not. Because efficiency is not a math problem when it comes to people. It comes down to circumstances and interrelated questions.
Even the utilization of rooms is not as black and white as we would like to think. To start with, what times and days do you measure against? The office hours may be the typical 8 to 5 but measuring conference room utilization from those hours will bring down utilization. A more typical busy window would be from 10a to 3p but then many meetings get dropped from the calculation. Similarly, Monday and Friday numbers will drag the utilization down. But the reality is, peak use is what really matters because while people are willing to move a meeting forward or back by a couple of hours or even a day earlier or later, they will only move it so far.
So, how should you look at conference rooms? If I had that answer, I would tell you. Unfortunately, all I know is that it is more complex than looking at utilization and efficiency numbers. All those will do is send you down a path to undersizing your spaces while making you think you are doing all of the right things.