Meeting Rooms

Prompted by this tweeted by David Gurteen, I recalled recent experience in a particular company.

I’ve been around a bit, worked over many years in different organisations, at different levels of management, and done a bit formal education and a lot of reading and writing on management subjects. I’d say I was a pretty well confirmed advocate of the MBWA (Management by Walking Around) approach and the Water Cooler ad-hoc conversations approach to organizational communications, even before ubiquitous social technology channels emerged.

However, my last full-time employment job (I currently work as an independent contractor) was in a Norwegian organisation where they took a very strong opposing view. Even having a conversation with someone at your desk or theirs was frowned upon – others at desks within earshot would “Shhh” and give dirty stares if you did stop to talk or shout over the open-plan cubicles more than a couple of sentences. You always had to invite someone over to a meeting area. To be fair there were various kinds of informal as well as formal meeting spaces available, but there was never the ad-hoc overheard participation.