Overview
As the desire to break away from monotonous office meetings grows, some managers opt to hold team gatherings in cafes instead. The appeal of a café setting lies in its relaxed atmosphere, offering a change from the typical work environment along with the opportunity for coffee and snacks.
However, the convenience and simplicity of conducting meetings in the office cannot be ignored. Cafés can be uncertain when it comes to seating availability, wait times, opening and closing hours.
Still, the question remains: Is hosting a work meeting in the office or a café preferable when it comes to team morale and enthusiasm for the gathering?
The Experiment
To explore the impact of meeting venues on team morale, we conducted a simple survey experiment with 805 participants, 403 from Amazon Mechanical Turk in 2021 and 402 from Prolific in 2022. Both of these online platforms are commonly used by academics to recruit research study participants. All procedures and survey measures were identical for both samples.
Participants were asked to envision a scenario where their boss wanted to meet with them and another co-worker to discuss an ongoing project. They were informed that the meeting could either take place in the office or at a nearby café, with images of both settings provided.
Specifically, participants were told to "Imagine that your boss wants to meet with you and another co-worker to catch up about a project you all are working on. The location for the meeting will be [an office meeting / a nearby café], pictured below." Participants were then shown one of the photos below (randomly assigned) as the prospective venue for the meeting.
Finally, participants were asked, "To what extent are you looking forward to this meeting?" (1 = Not at all, 7 = Extremely) using a 1-7 survey scale. Demographic questions asking gender and age were also posed to test whether the results differ based on those traits.
Results
Overall, participants seemed to look forward to the café meeting (avg. rating = 5.11) slightly more than the office meeting (avg. rating = 4.74), an increase of 7.7% significant (p = 0.001). The figure below illustrates this small yet statistically significant difference graphically.
The findings did not change significantly with gender. There was, however, a marginal effect of age, such that younger participants seemed to prefer the café setting more than older participants (p = 0.054), with each additional year of age reducing the preference for the café meeting over the office by 0.016 points (1-7 scale). However, we’d need to replicate this effect before placing too much emphasis on it. Finally, although Prolific participants rated the café meeting slightly more favorably than the MTurk sample, this difference was not significant (p = 0.162).
It’s important to highlight that we used only one photo of one office and only one photo of one café. Some offices may be great meeting locations, while some cafés may be less than suitable. Still, the results from our two separate online samples from two separate platforms, taken together, suggest an air of anticipation for our café meeting crowd.
Conclusion
Our experiment indicates that hosting meetings at a nearby café might be preferential to the office. In practice, it’s possible that these results may change. While cafés may offer a more relaxed and enjoyable setting, the convenience and predictability of the office may balance out the equation, especially if productivity is affected in the long-term. This may explain why older participants are indifferent; perhaps experience has revealed the office to be a more reliable option for getting work done. Furthermore, personal preferences and the specific context of the meeting may warrant additional consideration when choosing the most suitable venue.
Nevertheless, our findings suggest that if the opportunity and context align, a meeting at café just might give a little boost to team morale.
Methods Note
To test for significant differences in positive anticipation between the café and office conditions, we utilized ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis. The coefficient and corresponding "p-value" were used to determine significance, with p-values below 0.05 indicating statistical significance. OLS regressions were also used to test for potential interactions between the main results and participant demographics, including age, gender, and sample. The data and survey materials for this experiment are available upon request.