The serious challenges facing the State Department run the gamut — negotiating nuclear deals, enhancing embassy security, reviewing the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, sifting through Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, to name a few. But Foggy Bottom is also just a collection of offices that face the same operational, mundane Dunder-Mifflin-style problems as most workplaces.

So, this week, Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Heather Higginbottom (that would be the slot right under Secretary John Kerry) sent around a notice asking employees to weigh in on conference room deficiencies.

“To understand better the challenges staff experience finding, reserving, and using conference rooms for everything from large events to small meetings and to inform potential solutions to these challenges, I’d like to request that you fill out this brief survey,” Higginbottom wrote.

Higginbottom, a former domestic policy aide to President Obama and deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, might seem a little overqualified to be analyzing conference room space.

But this has broader implications. To find “innovative solutions to complex challenges” requires collaboration, she said.

So, to solve global challenges, State employees must first collaborate to solve the challenge of finding more collaborative space. Got it.

One State official wrote us that it was, in fact, quite unusual for someone at Higginbottom’s level to directly engage in such administrative tasks.

“This used to be a GS-15 issue run by the guy in charge of the facilities management,” the official told us, referring to a civil servant in a supervisory role.

But a State spokesman told us there is nothing out of the ordinary here. Higginbottom’s office often gets involved in such department-wide initiatives.

Once they have those conference rooms sorted, they’ll get right back to the quest for Middle East peace.