How to Plan Your Coworking Space Meeting Rooms

In this blog post, we’ll focus on 2 main components that will help you nail the right mix of meeting rooms for your coworking space: your location and your audience.

Having these in mind will increase the chance of making an educated decision when choosing what kind of rooms and how much of them to set in your space.

As a significant revenue stream and a necessity for every coworker, meeting places need proper planning and management aligned with the needs of your coworking space. Eventually, you’d also like to track and improve their usage so you can make the most out of them.

Let’s take a look at how location and audience impact your choice of meeting rooms:

The role your location plays in planning meeting rooms

As with any other real estate business, location is of high importance as it defines what kind of potential customers you have access to.

And that applies not only for members that would rent a desk or an office long-term. But also for the people who come to your space ad-hoc (i.e. drop-ins).

We’ve identified two distinctive scenarios in terms of your coworking location – you are either near (or in the heart) of huge business traffic, or not.

How does a high amount of business traffic affect meeting room planning?

If you’re in the heart of a business district, your member base probably consists of companies that need a premium business location. The usual reason for paying a higher price to be there is to regularly meet with people outside of their business.

In other words, they have to make themselves accessible. Also, they want to make the right impression and they’ll need an appropriate meeting space to make this happen.

On the other hand, as a crosspoint of many meetings and work travels, your visitors may often be drop-ins. The chance they’ll need a quiet place to sit for a few hours or a meeting room to meet with a business associate is huge. It’s good to think about how to market your meeting rooms so you can attract these people.

To cover the needs of both your regular members and drop-ins, a higher number of meeting rooms might be required.  And most likely the majority of meetings will be with clients of your members, which affects the proportion of “informal” and “formal” meeting places in your coworking space.

How does a lower amount of business traffic affect your meeting room planning?

If you’re not located near huge business traffic, it’s more likely the majority of your customers will stay long-term in your space and you’ll have fewer drop-ins.

Your members will still have meetings with clients, but it’s safe to assume that most meetings will be between teammates and coworkers.

You’ll still need formal meeting rooms. However, you’ll need to have enough informal meeting rooms, open leisure spaces, and joint areas, where teams can have a productive discussion and where community collaboration can happen.

The role your coworking audience plays in planning meeting rooms

Credits to Campus X – an awesome coworking space and tech incubator where part of the OfficeRnD team is located.

If you’ve nailed down the first point from the 3 essentials of every successful coworking community, you probably have a good understanding of your target audience and have attracted like-minded professionals in your space.

The essence of their business and their personality define their daily workflow (calls, meetings, etc), or what kind of communication they have (formal, casual, etc).

Let’s take a look at 2 examples that can influence how your meeting rooms should be planned:

Service-oriented companies and/or freelancers usually spend a huge amount of time on calls or meeting clients and partners. It’s safe to say that you’ll need a lot of phone booths in place to accommodate the higher number of calls. Also, meeting rooms would probably have to be equipped with coffee and water for eventual client meetings.

Product-oriented teams are mostly focused on building a product, not selling it. Those guys would usually have regular internal team meetings and will need private hang-out places to catch up with colleagues over a cup of coffee. They will also need a whiteboard/multimedia to write notes and present ideas visually.

The type of your audience and its daily work routine are important factors to be considered. They will give you the direction in which you need to focus on when choosing the meeting rooms in your coworking space.

Choosing the right type of meeting rooms

In the term “meeting rooms” we include everything from hangout places where your members can meet, chill and chat, to phone booths, to big conference rooms. Based on the meeting intention, we’ve divided meeting rooms into the following types:

Informal meeting rooms and spaces

These are hangout places, phone booths, and smaller meeting rooms that host just a few people and are generally not meant for long discussions. They usually don’t have much natural light, are not that spacious but still provide the essentials for a short meeting or a call.

You have to book some of them, others are ruled by first come, first served. People usually use them for informal or semi-formal meetings or calls.

It’s where your coworkers can chat with each other, or host job interviews. The small meeting rooms are normally equipped with a whiteboard and basic multimedia (TV), so you can make presentations and draft quick ideas with the team.

This type of “meeting rooms” don’t need to be located near the entrance, but should be easily accessible for your coworking members (from all floors, offices and open areas).

To decide how much space to dedicate to such places, or how to combine them, think about your members’ needs first. A few questions that can help you with that:

• Do your members make a lot of calls on a daily basis? If they do, you’ll need more small rooms and phone-booths.
• Do your members need discussions to happen in private? If yes, well closed-up meeting rooms will be better.
• Do coworkers make plenty of informal discussions? If yes, focus on leisure and hangout places.

Formal meeting rooms

These meeting rooms are usually more spacious, have more natural light, and are more representative. They are used for formal meetings with potential clients and business partners.

Meeting rooms from that type should be equipped with whiteboards and multimedia, as presentations often happen there. Additional services like coffee and water should also be an option.

Another thing to have in mind – this type of meeting room should be easily accessible, so it’s best to locate them near the entrance of the building, preferably on the ground or first floor.

Credits to Campus X – an awesome coworking space and tech incubator where part of the OfficeRnD team is located.

Boardrooms

These are high-luxury meeting rooms with a lot of amenities and services included directly in the price. They are suitable for formal meeting with partners, clients, investors.

The price is high, but these are the rooms where you would like to meet a high profile client or your potential investor. They are classy and are more typical for business centers, rather than coworking spaces.

Adding a boardroom might make sense if your coworking space is located in a global business city or district, where a lot of entrepreneurs, investors, and high profile business people meet.

Event spaces and Training rooms

These rooms often host public events, which attracts not only your members but people outside of your space as well. They are a good “tool” you can use to welcome external audiences and promote your space.

It’s best if they are designed in a flexible way – you should be able to move furniture easily and have some kind of free space where you can serve catering or that can be utilized for anything else related to the event.

A word of caution – event spaces and training rooms are not your typical meeting space. They take a lot of space and a lot of effort goes into utilizing them, so choosing to create one should be aligned with your strategy.

Additional Resources

We’ve got a few more resources we think might be also useful to you. Here there are:

Webinar: How to Design Top-Performing Meeting Rooms for Coworking Spaces

What you’ll learn

• What makes a meeting room attractive and user-friendly for coworking members and visitors
• How to choose the types of meeting rooms you need in your coworking space based on the needs of your customers
• How to set up wired and wireless connections in your meeting rooms
• How to choose between a TV screen vs projector and how to set them up
• 🎬 Watch it here.

eBook: How to Measure and Improve Meeting Rooms in Coworking Spaces

What you’ll learn

• The most important KPIs in terms of performance
• How to enhance meeting room utilization within your community
• How to add more value to your meeting rooms
• Useful marketing tactics to promote your meeting space
• How to increase revenue with external bookings
• 🎬 Download it from here.