3 Essentials for Designing Your Conference Room

Studies have shown that employees tend to be more productive and creative when they work in teams. In order to support and facilitate effective teamwork, you need to have a conference room that encourages collaboration.

Your conference room’s furniture, design, layout, and equipment all contribute to the success or failure of the group work that occurs within its four walls. Consider how you can use this to design your conference room.

Good Design

The design and layout of your conference room needs to encourage your employees to be productive and creative. The paint color, lighting, and décor should be unobtrusive and calming; jarring lighting, clashing colors, and distracting elements can reduce the efficacy of the conference space.

• Reduce distractions: Make sure that everyone in the room is comfortable by providing a round table as well as extra chairs. Provide natural light with windows and avoid fluorescent light – which can flicker – whenever you can.
• Encourage concentration: Wall colors like blue and yellow are calming and thus can be ideal for conference rooms. Utilize chip samples from design companies and home improvement stores to ensure your colors work together and create a feeling of calm.

Open Layout

Collaboration comes in a variety of forms, from routine communication and information sharing to mentoring and problem solving. The effectiveness of this collaboration can be maintained or undermined by the layout of your conference room. The layout needs to enhance creativity and productivity and be flexible for a variety of uses.

• Be sure that the functionality of the room works for those using it. This includes providing things like sufficient power cords and up to date phone equipment so that the room’s technology is a boon to creativity rather than an obstacle.
• A sense of open space prevents team members from feeling cooped up. An oppressive atmosphere can be detrimental to group dynamics, so make sure that the openness of your room is sufficient for collaboration and communication.
• Provide space other than the table area – you can do this by choosing creative office furniture such as pub style tables, a couch area, etc. This allows groups to have break-out sessions comfortably.

Teamwork-centered Equipment

The equipment provided in your conference room is an important element in creating effective and productive collaboration. This equipment ranges from the simple to the high-tech. Without the right tools in place, your employees will have a difficult time fulfilling the needs of their project.

With performance enhancing equipment at their disposal, employees can explore their creativity and increase collaborative output

• Have a VOIP phone available – this gives your employees easy access to make quick calls and utilize the various features that an internet phone system as to offer.
• Install a whiteboard in your conference room as the main focus of the space. This makes it easy to brainstorm, discuss ideas, and map out projects and plans for all to see.
• Invest in a projector to display the contents of your computer monitor onto a wall or large screen. Slides, images, and outlines can be shared quickly and easily to encourage collaboration.
• Video equipment for face-to-face interactions over the web can help your business make important connections clients, vendors, and customers.

Your conference room is your business’s central location for teamwork and collaboration. Having the right design, layout and equipment is integral to your employees’ creativity and productive output. Sometimes all it takes is a few simple changes to increase the effectiveness and enthusiasm of your team members.

Megan Webb-Morgan is a web content writer for www.ResourceNation.com. She writes about small business, focusing on topics such as business sales. Follow Resource Nation on Facebook and Twitter, too!