IF THEY HAD THE MEETINGS STANDING IN THE HALL IN THE FIRST PLACE...:

A mundane fixture of office life--the conference room--has become a flash point for tension and conflict.

Meetings are multiplying while private office space shrinks. Booking systems break down under dueling meetings. Employees reserve conference rooms far in advance--just in case they need them. Colleagues fume when a previous meeting drags on, leaving them standing in the hallway.

David Lewis sees the problem firsthand at employers he visits as a human-resources consultant. He and a client meeting to discuss sensitive personnel issues several months ago were exiled to Starbucks, after a conference room booked by his client was taken over by senior executives. Mr. Lewis and the client had to move again, to another coffee shop, when some of her co-workers arrived at Starbucks to hold a meeting of their own, says Mr. Lewis, president and chief executive of OperationsInc, Norwalk, Conn. "I had enough coffee to last a week just from that one meeting."

He was irritated again recently when a meeting at another client's offices went long, leaving his client and him "standing out in the hall like second-class citizens" for 15 minutes. 

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