Meeting rooms may be a waste of space

A survey of over 500 UK businesses suggests that meeting rooms may be an over-rated feature of the workplace.

Increasingly, meetings seem to take place anywhere but in the dedicated meeting space.

Office Angels, a company that specialises in recruitment of secretaries - and who better to know where people are meeting? - has found that in the past six months:

• over 60% of employees have been briefed in a taxi or on a train

• almost half caught up over coffee in the office kitchen

• a third were updated on the way to lunch, and

• a quarter shared news as they passed on the stairs or in lifts.

Most of these sessions last for only about 15 minutes, but they happen a lot - 65% said that the average week includes up to 20 'mobile meetings'. A fact worth thinking about when planning floorspace.

And if something you've heard in one of these brief encounters has you scanning the job ads, Office Angels has some advice there, too. Apparently an increasing number of employers are spicing up interviews with 'killer questions' - things like would you ever lie in the interests of the job or what was the question you didn't want me to ask, and even tell me a joke. Now, there's something to think about.

Elliott Chase