The Living Room Meets Seinfeld

What does The Living Room have in common with the hit sitcom Seinfeld? The answer may surprise you.

The daily grind looks a bit different these days. Isn’t that new commute from the bedroom to the living room grand? How about your work itself- is it virtual meetings all day, everyday? Indeed, we all seem to have become Zoom wizards practically overnight.

While WFH can be a nice change of pace, it might feel as though something is missing from your daily routine. And that’s because there is. That new 9-5 is lacking what all people need and crave in order to sustain the integrity of their mental & physical health (literally, on a cellular level): in-person human connection.

With technological advances empowering employees more and more with each passing day, the world’s workforce has been trending toward virtual offices. Yet a few things come to mind like nonverbal cues, creativity, and empathy- these are just a few things that can’t easily be observed via the virtual office. And research has consistently shown that FaceTime is no substitute for good old fashioned face-to-face time.

For example, MIT’s Human Dynamics Lab spent hundreds of hours tracking performance drivers by collecting data from electronic badges that monitored everything from tone of voice to body language. The lab’s results showed undeniably that the most valuable communication is done in-person. MIT HDL also reported that around 35 percent of the variation in a given team’s performance was explained by the number of times team members actually spoke face-to-face.

The Living Room has always believed that in-person gatherings are the best way to make your meetings count. For nearly a decade, we’ve built our foundation on it.  We wield human connection as a way to live out our business’ purpose of positively charging people & places. We intentionally designed our space to mimic the look and feel of a comfortable living space (hence our name), first for in-person research and offsite meetings then we naturally extended into coworking.

We also know that meetings aren’t always just about the space. Teams gather in-person to achieve a specific goal and meet their agenda. But often times, meetings go beyond that agenda.  Remember the Seinfeld episode “The Muffin Tops”? (Check it out here to jog your memory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXZ-Z4AgE0I.) Elaine confesses that she only enjoys eating the top of a muffin, she explains, “It’s the best part. It’s crunchy, it’s explosive, it’s where the muffin breaks free of the pan and sort of does it’s own thing.”

Well, please do pardon the humble brag here, but The Living Room IS the muffin top.

We’ve spent years carefully perfecting our craft, mixing together the best components into our batter to bake up the best experience possible for our clients. Our space allows you to check all the boxes on your meeting agenda while also creating opportunities for you to ‘break free of the pan.’  Off-the-wall activities like taking a twisty trip down our indoor slide, dipping outside to our deck for a breath of fresh air or simply gathering around a delicious house-made taco bar, make your time with us unique and memorable. But still productive!

If we’ve learned anything in these recent months, it isn’t that we saved gas money on that new commute (or rather, the lack thereof) but that we rely on each other and we crave opportunities that provide human interaction, for both our mental and physical well-being.

Your environment matters. Connecting in-person matters. And The Living Room is here to create the invigorating atmosphere you need to combine the two.