Office Hack #1 — Slack’s Rolling Rooms
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.
Our first Office Hack makes meeting spaces a “Choose Your Own Adventure” experience.
Slack is a white-hot company that’s re-inventing the way teams communicate and work together through software. Naturally, they decided to take the same philosophy when building their offices.
The result? They’ve hacked the traditional meeting room and created a brand new type of physical space, designed specifically to improve the ways teams work together.
Listen to this story on our Office Hacks podcast.
Slack Mobile Meeting Rooms are self-contained rooms on wheels that can be re-positioned creatively around the office.
The meeting rooms are essentially big plywood cubes mounted on castors. They measure 6 ½ feet by 6 ½ feet by 7 feet, and as you can see, the aesthetic is informal, but still very stylish.
One side of the box is open — so you can get in and out — and the other side has steel plate and glass on it. The goal is to create a bit of a barrier between what’s going on inside the box and outside it.
And… because the cubes are on wheels, you can re-arrange them into a variety of different formations. The coolest arrangement is to take two cubes and connect the open sides together — it creates an extended, enclosed meeting room that can hold up to 12 people.
Michael Leckie is the founder / principal of Leckie Studio Architecture and Design. He’s the inventor of the Slack Mobile Meeting Room.
We’ve recognized in all of our research about office culture and people’s work habits, that people really do value these smaller work spaces to break out into groups or even to just sit alongside one another and work in a slightly more casual way. We really wanted to provide a means for people to escape within the office environment. And also we like the idea that they would be able to move these boxes around in a playful way.
Michael Leckie
And these business boxes actually work, too. Marg Hernandez is Slack’s Office Manager, and every day, she sees how rolling rooms allow for variety, collaboration, and spontaneity.
I find that a lot of people do not like being stuck at their desk or working at their desk for the entire day. So there’s usually some morning people who would be working in these boxes, and then they would shift back to their desks in the afternoon. And then some people would be using the desk for the afternoon. And it’s also great for breakout spaces.
It’s something spontaneous — if the boxes are here, they just hop in the there and have a quick meeting / discussion.
Marg Hernandez
How to hack it
If you’d like a Michael Leckie Original, he makes a variety of these made-to-order rolling rooms and they range in price from $6000 — $15000 each.
For those on a tighter budget, there’s a wide variety of non-traditional meeting spaces you can explore for your office. Here’s a few of our favourites:
If you’d like to see some of Michael’s other inspiring work, or to commission your own Mobile Meeting Room of your own, check out:
Listen & Subscribe
You can listen to the full story in the Envoy Office Hacks podcast:
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More Office Hacks
If you enjoyed Slack’s moving meeting rooms, you might also love to learn about how turn your office walls into an instant art project. Here’s Office Hacks #2, ‘The Wall of Lego’:
And check out a social psychology in healthy eating from Social Print Studio:
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.
