By the year 2020, millennials will make up a full 50 percent of the U.S. workforce. And while you may have heard that millennials are disrupting everything about the modern workplace, the truth is that they share quite a few high-level values with older generations.
Like most of us, millennials want to work with people they like and trust. They want recognition for a job well done, and they want to seek out new opportunities and challenges. And when it comes to office collaboration, they prefer impromptu huddles over large pre-planned business meetings —because, as we all know, it’s much easier to get things done in a small group.
In fact, the influx of millennials into your workforce may provide the perfect opportunity to rethink your approach to conference rooms and meeting spaces from the ground up. Here are three big reasons why.
Workers demand mobility more than ever before
Some parts of your workforce, such as sales, have always been highly mobile. But in a modern organization, you’re constantly coordinating efforts among on-site and offsite employees. A growing number of companies don’t even assign workspaces to employees anymore, letting them work from anywhere they like, as long as each project gets completed on time.
These trends are nothing new, but they’re increasingly being applied to meeting spaces, too. Many organizations are rapidly phasing out conference rooms in favor of collaborative offices known as huddle rooms, where quick, casual, often unplanned meetings can happen as needed.
Millennials prioritize spontaneous teamwork
There’s probably no one on earth who actually loves long weekly staff meetings. But millennials are particularly up-front and outspoken about their preference for quick, informal huddles that take place as needed, solve a concrete problem, and then disperse. An increasing number of companies are introducing rooms designed to make spontaneous teamwork as easy as possible.
These rooms are typically just large enough for three or four people. The setup is simple: a table, a few chairs, and a screen for presentation and collaboration. Wireless and mobile technologies, along with social and collaboration software, make it easy for teams to pull assets they need from the web or office network, put them on-screen, and hash out the details.
Your workforce is geographically dispersed
The benefits of huddle rooms don’t stop at your office door. Today, even the smallest startups have workforces dispersed around the globe. This creates a clear need for workspaces where small groups can interact, whether those groups share the same building or work on different continents.
The prevalence of remote meetings provides one of the strongest arguments for huddle rooms. The schedules of your global workforce may not always line up with your weekly strategy session meetings, but huddle rooms will make sure they can still easily brainstorm, share information, and collaborate on documents with teams in your office.
To read on and find out more about how huddle rooms can empower your team members to collaborate more effectively, check out this Epson white paper, Huddle Rooms: How Demographics & Technology are Impacting Workspaces.
