Guiding Principles for Your Workplace

The challenge with giving specific details on how to set up a mobbing environment is that every workplace is different—there are just so many variations on how your specific workplace is laid out that to cover all of them would be a book in itself (and a pretty boring book, at that). Instead, this chapter will outline a few guiding principles and then cover some of the most common scenarios; use these as a template and adjust to suit your specific needs.

The guiding principles around adjusting your workspace for mobbing are:

• Try before you buy.
• Movable is better than fixed.
• Nearer is better than farther.
• Space is important.

Here’s a closer look at each:

Try before you buy. It’s unusual to get the hardware setup correct the first time around. Before blowing your budget on that large, high-resolution TV that everyone wants, rent it for a few weeks. If things don’t work out, you can try something else. Once you have a better idea of what works, then you buy it—renting everything for the first month keeps this option open, so try before you buy wherever possible.

Movable is better than fixed. When things are fixed to the ground or bolted to the wall, they’re difficult to move, and that’s something you want to avoid. For all you know, the size of your mob may change, and you’ll need to move equipment around to maintain an ideal mobbing experience—so rather than keep equipment and other things firmly fixed in place, keep them movable.

Nearer is better than farther. The nearer you have your mobbing area to where your team works, the better. Even a few meters away from your regular working areas can mean the difference between a mob happening or people working on their own. In my experience, there seems to be a direct correlation between the distance between the mobbing area and where a team normally works and the amount of mobbing that actually happens.

Space is important. When you plan your mob area, make sure there’s enough space for people to sit comfortably and not feel crowded. I’ve seen mobbing areas where people were on top of each other because there simply wasn’t enough space available—this leads to a suboptimal experience. How much space you need depends on the mob area layout you choose; you’ll learn more about that in ​A Typical Mob Layout​.