Best Company Ever, Chapter 7

It’s been months since I last left the BCE with a mailroom full of penguins. Who knew they would advance of the corporate ladder so fast? I mean, come on! A movie deal? Hey guys when you come back from the your press junket with Morgan Freeman, would you mind doing a quick sort and deliver before you call it a day in the name of Happy Hour? And yeah, you better believe that they have a beer of choice. Doobie, doobie-do.

Taking a break from staffing issues, I figure I might as well talk a little Facilities, you know, to put my last 2.5 years of experience to use. Now no matter what your office setting is, it’s likely that at some point, you’ll find yourself in a meeting. Meetings, because of their pesky requirement of “involving more than one person” rarely can take place in your cube. And I bet your boss’s office isn’t big enough to hold more than two or three people at most. However, divine planning has given us an alternative from cramped convening.

And on the seventh day, the Architect made Conference Rooms.

For the most part, all conference rooms are exactly the same. Big table in the middle of the room, chairs all around (although always one less than you actually need), a credenza for the phone, an empty coffee pot, and enough Styrofoam cups to give Greenpeace a coronary. Throw some corporate art on the wall, maybe an easel or whiteboard for good measure, and dude, you’ve got yourself a meeting place. Hold up.

This is not the format for any conference room at the Corporate HQ of Best Company Ever. No, a BCE Conference Room must be able to provide all the functions of conference rooms at every other sucker company out there. Business must be able to take place, and with a level of importance and like every participant’s comment could mean fortune or failure. With that said, throw out the table, chairs, the Styrofoam and everything else. What this room needs is gaming tables.

Now I’m not just trying to turn a conference room into wherever those damn penguins are drinking right now – hear me out. By installing a corporate set of gaming tables in a conference room, a manager can expect his employees (and visiting clients) to become even more productive than before, and have a little, dare I say, fun in the process. Let’s design the room, shall we?

Regardless of what you plan to do in this conversational mecca, you are going to need a center table to convene around and hammer out an agenda. Papers will be passed around the table, but by the time everybody has their stack of papers ready, Mark in Logistics has fallen asleep. Solution: replace that silly fancypants oak table with an air hockey table and watch as paper magically floats from person to person.

Now a conference room, especially in an awesome company like BCE, needs to be multi-functional. Therefore, our floorplan must suit all of the following needs.

Negotiations – This type of meeting involves a back and forth between two sides as they move towards an inevitable compromise. Well, grab a paddle folks. With a ping pong table, both players must play to get their way. Miss a shot? You have to make a concession.

Strategy – Strategy meetings are also a popular reason to reserve a conference room. These are often difficult because there are too many balls up in the air to hammer out a plan of attack. It’s time to get said balls out of the air and onto the table. Grab a cue stick, we’re playing pool. Tackle the issues one-by-one until only the eight ball is left.

Personnel – Annually, important managers must do the impossible – performance reviews for a cadre of employees that they have no idea who they actually are. In order to make the random assignment of wage increases fun, throw the employees names on the backs of all the foosball players on that new table where the credenza was. Do a post-game evaluation of their efforts, and adjust salary accordingly.

Budgeting – We’ll just use the way we use to do budgeting now for costs and revenues that are completely unpredictable. Get Maintenance on the phone, we’ve got to hang ourselves a dartboard.