Office Hack #11 — The Ping Pong Boardroom Table
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.
Picture this: you’re in an office boardroom. The situation is tense.
The air is thick.
The stakes are high.
…and so are the paddles.
Today’s Envoy Office Hack: The Ping Pong Boardroom Table.
Listen to this story on our Office Hacks podcast.
When Rethink Communications first started out, like a lot of new companies they had more debt than available cash. So when it came time to purchase a boardroom table, they looked for something that would not only be affordable but could also have dual functionality.
Little did they know at the time that their thrifty purchase would later become the basis of their company’s theory of communication.
Sitting around a ping pong table instead of a more corporate boardroom table inspired many an idea. But perhaps the most befitting one of all was the company’s own belief in effective communication. The Rethink Ping-Pong Ball Theory suggests a clear, single thought is easier to get across, and be received, than multiple ones.
“A lot of clients come in with a brief and they’ve got three or four ping pong balls…
‘So I want to talk about my product, I want to talk about the price, I want to talk about this special feature, and I want to talk about where it comes from.’ And we say back to them, well it would be like me throwing FOUR ping pong balls at you and chances are, you wouldn’t catch one of them. And we say to our clients, only have ONE ping pong ball that you’re trying to get across.”
Tom Shepansky, Co-founder
It’s not all serious though. The boardroom table gets its fair share of table tennis matches. And as it turns out, the benefits of playing aren’t restricted to morale boosting and camaraderie. Ping pong has been shown to be an excellent exercise for the body and the brain.
How to hack it
If you’d like to incorporate a little sport into your office boardroom, here’s what you’ll need.
Ingredients
- Ping Pong Table ($380)
- Paddles ($17)
- Extra Ping Pong Balls ($7)
- Bucket ($6)
- Total cost — approx. $410
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 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.
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.
