Home Improvement

How to add meeting rooms and office space without disruption

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Adding meeting rooms to an office space can be a major undertaking, one involving significant upheaval featuring architects, builders and an assortment of handymen.

So, if you are looking to avoid the disruption of a major renovation but still give employees somewhere they can meet with colleagues away from the hubbub of the wider office, you are going to need to come up with an innovative solution.

Purpose-built modular units and portable room dividers work well in such circumstances.

These units are typically made by interlinking acoustic, fabric, laminate, or acrylic panels, which can be formed into the right angles to give a traditional room shape or into an encircling pod if that better suits the topography and layout of your office.

But before you introduce this type of modular meeting room into your office, you need to consider a few things – not least the shape of the rooms you want to create, the amount of seclusion and privacy you’re looking to achieve, and the materials you want to use.

We take a closer look at these aspects of semi-permanent meeting rooms below.

Room Types

The first step in adding meeting rooms is deciding what kind of spaces you actually want to add to an office.

Not all temporary meeting rooms are equal – depending on what purpose you are looking to achieve with your ad hoc meeting spaces, you will need different sizes, panelling arrangements, and fabrication materials.

The basic meeting room types include:

Fully enclosed meeting rooms: Come with four walls, a lockable door and an enclosing ceiling.
Semi-enclosed meeting pods: Feature two or three walls, and are left partially open to the rest of the office space.
Multi-purpose meeting/training rooms: Often include walls made from writable laminate panels so the walls themselves can be used as whiteboards.
Small meeting or focus pods: Useful for remote meetings and 1-to-1 meetings.
Custom or bespoke meeting rooms: Feature a mix of acoustic, glazed, laminate, or acrylic panels in an ad hoc arrangement to suit particular needs.

Material Choice

The types of materials you use when employing temporary meeting rooms are all-important.

Usually, you will want to achieve a mix of privacy, peace and soundproofing if you are looking to add fresh meeting rooms to an office space.

However, there are trade-offs to be taken into consideration here.

You can achieve excellent soundproofing by using acoustic panels for the walls of your rooms – these are thick, foam-laden panels that are great at muffling sound.

But if you want to keep sightlines open and allow natural light in, their opacity means they are not the best option.

Rather, an acrylic or Perspex screened wall would work better, but of course, this type of material doesn’t boast the sound-blocking properties of foam.

A nice hybrid option is to use double-panel or even triple-type panels, which are fabricated from two or three different materials – the bottom half or two-thirds muffles sound, while the top part gives sight lines or sports your company’s colours and branding.

Anti-bacterial Fabrics

In some sectors and industries – healthcare, for example – hygiene is of the utmost importance when introducing semi-permanent meeting rooms.

In such cases, it’s important to ensure the materials used for the panelling possess the right mix of anti-bacterial qualities, wipe-clean surfaces, and privacy.

The good news is that in many cases, ad hoc meeting rooms nowadays come encased in germ-killing antibacterial fabrics.

Often the material is impregnated with positively charged silver ions, which do a great job of trapping and killing nasties like E. coli, MRSA and Salmonella.