What’s the best shape board room table?

Another Board Meeting this morning, using Magic Minutes to take the minutes and actions and send out all the emails automatically. By why the long table? Probably because it’s easier to buy – but in my opinion it’s not easier to meet around.

We see a lot of different meeting room set ups as we travel around chairing meetings for companies, and they all have very different furniture and layouts. Not surprisingly, the owners of the businesses are all very proud of their own ones and prefer theirs to anyone else’s. As a ‘user’ of the table I have to say I have my favourites though. The long rectangular table isn’t one of them. You have to think of the meeting room like you would a work station – we all need to have a space to put our papers and laptops, we need to see the screen and we need to see each other. It is surprisingly difficult to achieve all of these goals.

This design has plenty of space for meeting papers – and cups of coffee as you can see in the picture. The distance to the screen for the people at the far end is a bit of a problem though and I find myself zooming the browser in to around 150% to make the magic minutes app more readable at the back. When people are talking though, there is an awful lot of leaning back or forward to crane past the people between you and speaker if they are on the same side of the table as you. This one is designed to seat 15, so there could be a lot of people in the way.

Have a look at some of the other blog posts and some of our Instagram images for other design ideas. You’ll soon work out which ones we prefer working with.