Everybody knows not to take a call in the back room

In most of the offices we walk into, there is one room where nobody takes a call. Somebody stands up mid-sentence, carries the conversation out toward the front window, and finishes it there. Nobody remarks on it. It has been that way for about a year.

Offices are good at this. The back desk went to the newest person because it was free, and it was free for a reason. Client calls moved to the front. Nobody complained, because by the time anyone might have, everyone had already moved. It comes up forty minutes into a review, when somebody laughs and says you can’t use the back room.

Is it the building, or is it the equipment?

Two different problems produce that same shrug, and what cures one does nothing at all for the other. Either something in the building is standing in the way, or something about the equipment is wrong — and with equipment it is nearly always where it sits, not how old it is.

Older buildings around here give plenty of honest reasons. Plaster over metal lath, a stone exterior, a fire door, a records room lined with steel cabinets, a stairwell sitting between the back desk and everything else. None of that is a fault. A house built in 1910 was not laid out with a long, thin office in mind.

The equipment side is duller than people expect. In most small firms, all of it went wherever the cable already came into the building — a closet at one end, a shelf above the front desk. Somebody made a wiring decision years ago, and that decision has been quietly choosing where people can work ever since.

Walk the floor before you buy anything

Call somebody patient, put the call through the office signal rather than the phone network, and walk every room slowly, talking the whole way. Where they ask you to say that again, stop. Do it twice — once at seven in the morning, once at eleven with everyone in — and note four things:

• Do you lose people in one room, or everywhere past the middle of the building?
• Does the trouble start at seven in the morning, or only once fourteen people are in?
• Does everybody struggle in that spot, or does one person struggle everywhere?
• Is there a doorway you can step back and forth across to make it come and go — and what is that wall made of?

Those four answers do most of the sorting. Somebody who struggles everywhere has a problem of their own, and it is not the building. A room that defeats everyone who walks into it is the building, or where the equipment sits. Trouble that arrives at eleven and goes home at four is neither — that is fourteen people sharing something set up for four.

A bigger one in the same closet

The instinct is to buy a stronger version of the same thing and put it in the same closet at the same end of the building. You cannot get through a wall by shouting louder from the same room. What usually helps is a second place for coverage to start from, put where people actually sit, with a cable run to it — a morning’s work for somebody with a ladder.

And some dead spots are worth leaving exactly as they are. A supply closet does not need coverage, and neither does the parking lot; we have talked owners out of paying attention to both. The one to fix is the one where somebody works, or where clients sit and wait.

If you would rather somebody else did the walking, that is part of a review — ninety minutes on site, and the written report is yours either way.