Office Hack #13 — The Mozilla Ball Pit
Envoy is all about making things easier and more fun in the office. In that spirit, we are proud to bring you our new Envoy Office Hacks podcast series. Every week, we deliver the coolest, most ingenious, and just plain fun fixes people have invented to improve efficiency and productivity in their workplace.
When you think of conference rooms, things that come to mind may include…
- tedious, seemingly never-ending meetings
- monotonous, tiresome speakers
- powerpoint presentations with 100+ slides on the state of your company’s financials
But today’s Office Hack turns that place of dread into a place of play. Employees at Mozilla, makers of Firefox, dumped tens of thousands of rubber balls where you would expect to find a boardroom table.
Listen to this story on our Office Hacks podcast.
The Mozilla conference-room-turned-ball-pit isn’t just for frolic, fun and body-rolling, it’s also for conducting serious business. At least, that’s what the people at Mozilla said.
The room has video-conferencing capabilities and there is a couch for, you know, serious meetings.
The ball pit happened quite by accident. Someone brought in a bag of rubber balls to prank a colleague, but when the prank fell through, people got to wondering how many more balls it would take to fill part of a conference room.
“One day we came into the office, and there were twenty-thousand ball pit balls in pallet sized boxes stacked up outside that room, and they were building a Lego retaining wall to hold it all together.”
Potch, Developer Relations at Mozilla
The Mozilla team quickly realized they would need to set some ground rules. The laws of the pit are as follows:
- No shoes
- No diving
- No high jumping
- And no peeing (!)
There have been a few ball pit mishaps, like the time all staff were set on high alert for the missing ninja, lost somewhere in the depths of balls.
But mostly, the ball pit is just for serious business. At least that’s what the people at Mozilla said.
How to hack it
If you’d like to set-up your own strictly-business ball pit, it’s pretty straightforward:
Ingredients
- 50 x 400-piece value pack of ball pit balls ($51 each)
- Jumbo blocks for retainer wall ($164)
- Total cost — approx. $2,700.
Recipe
- Determine room and area within room for ball pit
- Build a retainer wall with jumbo blocks to limit area size
- Dump 50 packs of ball pit balls to fill area
- Hold serious meetings
Listen & Subscribe
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More Office Hacks
If you enjoyed this hack be sure to check out other Envoy Office Hacks, including:
A mobile meeting space in a rolling room from white-hot software start-up, Slack:
And one office’s creative solution to boring office walls — the Wall of Lego:
And a social psychology experiment in healthy eating from Social Print Studio:
Or how about a robotic sales gong to crank up team spirit in the office:
And then there’s Hootsuite’s office hack: an open office turned ski village.
Never underestimate the power of taxidermy on company culture…
Pub Nub hacks its way from annoying coffee woes… to website.
Mozilla takes something old and makes it new again.
One man’s getaway is another man’s office.
A big orange slide makes getting around this office a whole lot of fun.
No office boardroom is complete without some paddles and a net.
And here’s THE perfect hack for gross office kitchens everywhere.
Got an Office Hack you’d like to share? Do you know a stroke of genius that has made an office more productive or fun? You could be featured in a future Envoy Office Hack — let us know about it at officehacks@envoy.com.
