Working as an organization development specialist and professional meeting facilitator for more than twenty years, Sharon J. Heringer has planned, conducted, and participated in more than 1500 meetings, held in every conceivable meeting environment. Based on these experiences, Sharon distilled ten new standards for effective meeting room design to serve the needs of meeting participants, meeting planners and facilitators, and venue providers in pursuit of their respective goals. Her article, "Ten New Standards for Meeting Room Design," was recently published in the practitioner's journal of The NTL Institute for Applied Behavioural Science, Practising Social Change. Download a free .pdf copy of the article from this page.
The summer I was 24, I lived in a beautiful, historic cabin deep in the forests of California's Sierra Nevada mountains. I drove farther into the woods each day to my job growing trees for the U.S. Forest Service. Then I applied to and was accepted at the Harvard Business School. When I was 25, my life went from one extreme to another as I started the MBA program at Harvard University and went from living in the High Sierra to living the high life in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Everything at Harvard was new to me. Frankly, I expected to see some pretty amazing things. But as weeks, months, and eventually years of my life went by, I came to see something quite different.
For many companies, workplace is a significant business expense. According to the IRS, rent and depreciation expenses average six percent of total costs across all US corporate returns. For most businesses, however, payroll and related expenses are even greater. Payroll-related costs average 14 percent across all US corporate returns, more than twice average rent and depreciation. As a result, workplace innovations that improve both labor productivity and workplace costs offer triple the potential business and financial benefits compared to projects that only reduce workplace costs.