Teemwork

A Workplace Improvement Story — Part I

Ingemar Wiemer
WX Weekly
Published in
5 min readAug 9, 2017

--

The Sweet Candy Building (Teem HQ) in beautiful downtown Salt Lake City, Utah.

WWhen you come across an issue around rooms or spaces at work, how does your company handle it? Does one department — or a complex bureaucracy — own the process of fixing the issue? Or are you fortunate enough to have stellar intradepartmental cooperation and action?

Recently here at Teem we uncovered some issues with one of our conference rooms and assembled a cross-departmental team to solve them. This is our story of how we used Teem tech and employee talents to improve our workplace.

Something Wasn’t Right

Just like William “Bill” S. Preston Esq. and “Ted” Theodore Logan noticed the subtleties of strange things at the Circle K, we noticed that something just wasn’t quite right in our historic downtown office. When we looked at our building’s workplace analytics at the beginning of June 2017, we found some irregularities in room usage stats around one room in particular.

Tucked away beneath the rafters of the second story of our office was the anomaly — The Banana Stand.

The Banana Stand Conference Room

The Banana Stand 💰 🍌

The room is average size for a conference room, comfortably seating 4–5 people. It’s right next to another conference room we’ve named The Schwartz. The Schwartz, while decorated and themed differently than the Banana Stand, has a similar seating capacity but slightly different furniture and technology setups.

Teem insights showed that from May 12 — June 12, The Schwartz was booked 247 times for meetings. The Banana Stand? Well, there wasn’t really money in this one. Over the same time frame, it was booked only 151 times, thats 96 or 39% fewer scheduled meetings in a room that shares a wall with the other better performing conference room.

The Problem

So now we realized we had a serious room usage issue. If the Banana Stand was booked for nearly 100 fewer meetings than the room directly next to it, then it meant valuable office space wasn’t being utilized as efficiently as possible and the problem was the room not the location.

We assembled a small team consisting of representatives from IT, Facilities and Marketing, and together we identified the following problems with the Banana Stand:

  • Old/uncomfortable task chairs surrounded a standard worktable.
  • Hardware and other amenities were limited — only one Mac Thunderbolt monitor for screen displays and video conferencing.
  • The room’s themed decor was weak. Visitors were confused on why it was called the “Banana Stand” and most meetings in that room started with a sheepish apology for the room’s lack-luster theming.

Those drawbacks were enough to turn employees away from the Banana Stand in favor of a room that simply felt and worked better. And we were going to fix it.

The Remodel

Like we said before, employees from IT, Marketing, and Facilities all planned this remodel. This is when we saw the true camaraderie between our departments. More importantly, though, was the intradepartmental collaboration to make the remodel a functional, effective use of time and money for everyone. Not just marketing or sales, but everyone within the company.

One thing that was very clear from the start was a facelift alone wasn’t the answer to fixing the Banana Stand — we needed to change the culture and capabilities of the room itself.

One idea that cropped up consistently as various employees discussed the proposed remodel was retro gaming. As it just so happen, Teem has a #videogame Slack channel, and we quickly put the word out that we were looking to remodel the Banana Stand into an arcade-themed room and solicited ideas.

Suddenly, everyone in the entire company had ideas and offers to help. People from each department in the company contributed thoughts, ideas and even decor— that eventually made the remodeling plans a reality. In place of the Banana Stand, we were going to build Flynn’s Arcade.

The plans called for:

  • A complete theme update and room redesign: Maps of classic games decorating the walls, like Asteroids and Pac-Man, were chosen. We also ordered some canvas prints of NES game cartridges.
  • Adding better tech: This room desperately needed better tech, including a wall-mounted TV with easier connectivity to allow for screen displays.
  • Better layout & furnishings: The furniture in the room wasn’t bad, it was just too sparse and not very functionally arranged, so we set plans in motion to design a better solution.

One final Easter Egg did turn up, unbeknownst to most of the company. The surprise further invested employees into the remodel of the room, but the surprise didn’t arrive until after the remodel began on June 28, 2017.

What was the surprise, and how do we accomplish the remodel? We’ll discuss that in Part II of this story of Teem using Teem to help us improve our workplace experience.

💚 Recommend this story, subscribe and share.

The score is the date Ender Labs (Teem’s Incubator) was formed.

This is Part I in a 3-part series of posts about our experience of a conference room renovation at Teem HQ that took place in the summer of 2017.

--

--