In today’s new hybrid workplace, flexibility and employee engagement reign. Leaders are constantly questioning how much space to rent, where they should put it, and what amenities and office features they should include to ensure people are plugged in and efficient at work. Adaptability is everything. At Industrious, we provide those agile, flexible workspaces to a large swath of companies—from large companies with hybrid workforces dispersed across the country to smaller, fast-growing companies that may or may not triple their headcount next year. Our member companies don’t commit to a long-term lease, they can easily move people and swap out space within our global network of properties, and they can add or subtract needs over time.

Our members want to feel welcome, empowered and delighted while they are here. That can happen literally when there are ample outlets to power up or when the meeting room AV works straight away. People seem to delight in the styling of our space. We now have 160 locations in nine countries and we’re growing. Our design team will put out 20 new locations this year, excluding our fast-growing European locations, and we’re revamping the design of a number of existing U.S. properties. It's crucial that we design workspaces that work for hundreds of companies and meet their needs both today and tomorrow. ROOM is crucial to our team’s space planning.

Life before ROOM

In a way, there’s no life before ROOM because ROOM has been our go-to provider of prefabricated phone booths for at least six years. Every year or two, our design team does a marketplace investigation to ensure that we still have the right product for workplace privacy. Each time, we find that ROOM outpaces the competition with the right mix of quality, price, service, and simplicity. We love the products and our members recognize the brand across our portfolio and find them intuitive and easy to use. 

A Growing Need for Privacy

People need privacy. ROOM booths are part of a suite of private space we offer to our members to work through their day with the tools and spaces they need to do their best. Today it is really rare that all your folks are in one room physically together when meeting. Even when you plan your best to be together, there is always someone who needs flexibility that day to join remotely. The single person office phone booth is comfortable for a short term focus session or participating or leading a meeting virtually. In our product, it is easy to see where the ROOM booths are. We like to cluster them together so it’s plain to see if one is available, and the simple and clean design makes it completely intuitive to use.

The need for privacy has increased in the past three years, and as a result, we’ve been adding more phone booths in each location. Today we put 10 to 15 ROOM phone booths in each 25,000-square-foot office space.

In the past, we would put a few phone booths near “neighborhoods” of workers. But we found that when they’re scattered all over, a person might find themselves walking in a big circle just to find an open phone booth. So we started clustering three to five of them in a row in a hallway, say, near the central hub of a space or a cafe. People are already walking to those places throughout the day, and so they know exactly where the booths are in the building.

Intuitive Design

ROOM’s phone booths are very intuitive. You walk up to one, you see that it’s empty, pop in and use it. I love the simplicity of the design - both functionally as well as aesthetically. People go in, make their calls and they’re done. It’s a shared thing. The brevity plus the design of it, kind of teaches you how to use it.

Durable and Low Maintenance

As a former interior designer creating space for clients, I would choose products based on other things, such as the colors, a product’s clean lines, or the fact that it was 10 inches taller than everything else. It was never based on price and durability. I convinced clients to buy a product, but then I would walk away. Their facilities people would have to manage the product when it broke down.

Now, as owner-operators of workspace, we designers have to be conscious about price and equally conscious about quality. I'm responsible if something breaks down; the facilities person comes to me. The ROOM booths hold up well over time, requiring very little maintenance. ROOM has the right balance of affordability and quality, which makes it a really great asset to use at scale—making our members happy and helping our bottom line.

A Service Team that Gets It

ROOM is not only very competitive on price, but the company’s service is over the top. They have really gone the extra mile to help us when we’ve run into challenges. For instance, we buy so many of these rooms in bulk, and we asked the service team if they could help us in shipping. They got really creative around packaging and were able to package them differently so we could get more phone booths into a single shipping container. They also helped us with city building codes that constantly are added and changed across the country. For our Seattle location, the ROOM team conducted research on the city’s earthquake and fire code requirements and provided us with real-time data on what was changing. The team is always there asking what we need and when we need it. They never miss a deadline. They’re a really serious group of people who don’t take themselves too seriously. They just get it.