At Density's San Francisco office, we launched a bold experiment: no more advance room bookings.
Do you remember the world before cell phones? We would make plans to meet at a specific time and place. When that failed, chaos. Now that we have the tools to react to the reality of our unpredictable lives, we can easily meet up last minute and change plans on a dime.
Meeting rooms have not caught up to this reality. However, a world of meeting rooms booked in advance assumes:
These things are all false.
Meeting rooms are increasingly used on-demand: Density Advisory found that 65% of meeting use is drop-ins.
But what workplaces have been lacking is good tools to help navigate the on-demand office. Density Live is a real-time map of available spaces that makes finding space a breeze. That was all we needed to go all-in on on-demand.
At our San Francisco office, we launched a bold experiment: no more advance room bookings (okay, we kept a few exceptions for events and interviews - we're not complete rebels). Instead, everyone uses Density Live to find an available space when they need it.
When we unveiled the experiment, people were less than thrilled:
“I think this will be very uncomfortable. I hate change.”
“Usually, I wander around the office looking for space and end up back at my desk. Won’t this make that worse?”
Hey, at least we didn’t take away their Wifi this time.
So what happened? It turned out people were actually MORE likely to say they found the space they needed for meetings during the experiment than they were before (83% agree vs. 73% agree).
This is what we found out from a weekly survey employees at the start of the experiment, and then on a weekly basis following that to capture their sentiment around finding space for meetings.
Because survey data can be prone to bias - who decides to respond to a survey, how they’re feeling at the time, and what they think we want to hear - we also turned to sensor data to get a more ground-truth view of what happened during the experiment.
Our office saw more efficient use of meeting space during the Live Meetings experiment, with one-person meetings dropping from 26% to 20% of total meeting room usage, a 22% decrease. Meanwhile, 4-6 person meetings grew from 17% to 23%.
While these changes are relatively small, they are a meaningful shift toward the behavior we hope for in the workplace - more face-to-face collaboration.
We captured qualitative data to hear how employees felt during the experiment. The mood lifted from the initial grumblings to downright good vibes:
“I haven't really experienced a difference in how quickly I can or can't find a room, which is surprising.”
“Changing behavior is difficult, but this could lead to better efficiencies.”
“This has been refreshing, actually.”
Live meetings is our status quo going forward - being flexible with office space helps us use our resources better without making work harder or less enjoyable. As offices keep changing, using on-demand systems makes our workspaces more responsive, more adaptable and more fun.
Learn more about Density Live or request a demo to see Density in action.
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