Every time I hear about a failed conference room, it always goes the same: beautiful, functional, and fine in the walkthrough. But when the team needs to use it for the first time for a big remote meeting, it’s a disaster. The projector turns on, the table is clean, and it all looks great until week two when there’s an echo in the conference line, and the IT team has to open a ticket to find that one teeny tiny DisplayPort-to-VGA connector, “somehow not in the conference room because someone must have borrowed it for their desk.” Now you’re rescheduling the meeting, which inevitably clashes with Pod 14’s all-hands meeting, causing a two-scrum-worth of engineers to congregate in the hallway. All of this is invisible to the furniture catalog sales team, but bleeding both the IT budget and the morale of your distributed workers, who were probably struggling with the wifi signal in that corner of the building anyway.
Start with the use-case, not the catalog
Before you buy the six-seat table or the eight-seat table, define the use-case for the room. A six-seat huddle room, a six-seat client pitch room, and a six-seat all-hands room are very different design challenges, not three options for the same room. Six seats in a room with all local participants is a different design challenge than six seats split between three time-zones. Know the max headcount, the local-to-remote participant ratio, and the dominant meeting type before choosing any equipment and you’ll avoid the trap of overbudgeting rooms for edge cases while underbudgeting for daily meetings.
Design for audio first, video second
This is a surprising point for many people, but it’s true: distributed participants will complain about audio problems long before video artifacts. They’ll tolerate a blurry image, but not echo, clipping, and a mic that only picks up the person who’s right next to the camera. Poor audio is the number one cause of wasted meeting time and the cause of the “can everyone hear me” ritual that burns minutes of every call. Spend more on mics and room acoustics before video resolution, and if you have to make a trade-off, prefer audio. Nobody left a meeting wishing the resolution was lower.
Plan power and cabling at the same time as furniture
This is where the rubber meets the road, and it’s easily the most expensive lesson to learn if you skip this step. Power distribution and floor boxes have to be designed into the furniture plan, not tacked on at the end. It’s more expensive and disruptive to retrofit a finished room with a floor outlet than it would have been to plan for it from the start when choosing the table and chair package. When you’re working with the furniture vendor, ask them to plan in power distribution, and make sure your cable management needs like raceways, grommets, and floor boxes are specified. Ask where power needs to come out on the table, where the codec and switcher will go, and how they’ll be routed to the display, the room microphone, and any other gear.
Standardize the control system across all rooms
If every conference room in your building has a different touch panel, a different login workflow, or a different way to place or answer a call, every single one of those rooms will create a tech support ticket for maintenance. The alternative is to standardize the control system across all rooms and plan in a uniform user experience. It may seem like a minor point, but it becomes a major pain when multiple sites are involved. A user should be able to use any room in any office without training or support. The same familiarity should be present across all rooms, especially as multiple sites are added. If the user can navigate the touch panel at the New York office, they should be able to do the same at the Denver office.
Choose furniture that makes room for cables and sightlines
This is the design flaw that leads many companies to end up on this list, usually due to buying furniture à la carte. No one thought to plan the table, the chairs, the media cart, and the display together, and so when it comes to managing a cable or seeing the camera feed, nothing lines up. When comparing conference room sets, look for systems furniture that work together, rather than treating each piece as an isolated purchase. Systems furniture is designed to work together, to hide necessary cabling, and to put displays and microphones in sightlines that work for everyone. It’s much easier to achieve a good aesthetic and technical harmony by buying a room as a coordinated whole. It also puts the onus on one vendor to make everything work together rather than three vendors who all blame each other when the 1440p display doesn’t line up with the 4K display in the other conference room. For a growing company that’s looking to buy multiple rooms at once, it’s a major time saver to have the systems furniture already figured out, because installation time is cut dramatically and problems don’t arise when moving from one room to the next.
Budget for basic acoustic treatment
Unless you want your conference room to sound like a subway station, don’t furnish it with glass, tile, or bare walls. Even the best microphones and speakers will struggle to overcome the acoustics of a room with hard surfaces that reflect sound. Treat the room with acoustic panels, carpets, or even furniture to deaden sound reflections and reduce annoying echo. Sound treatments also help to lower the noise floor by creating a more insulated room that doesn’t leak as much ambient noise from outside. Plus, it all looks good! It doesn’t have to be an intensive treatment as pictured; just a few strategically placed panels and some soft seating can be enough to make a big difference. Don’t leave it too late to budget for acoustic treatment, either, because it can be much more expensive to retrofit a finished room than it would have been to plan in budget-friendly treatments from the start.
Light the room for the camera, not the table
Overhead lighting that looks good in the room may not look so good on camera. Avoid shadows on faces or washout effects on the background, and go for camera-ready lighting that’s diffused to avoid harsh lighting effects. Camera lighting is an easy budget item to overlook compared to most other AV purchases, but it shouldn’t be. It’s much cheaper than most of the other items on this list and has a major impact on the aesthetics and usability of the room. Lighting should be designed into the bigger AV design rather than left to the interior design team.
Add scheduling displays and occupancy sensors at the door
Do you know what happens when people reserve a room, but then fail to vacate it after their meeting ends? If they reserved it for a half-hour meeting that ended fifteen minutes ago, the room is now blocked for the next three groups that need somewhere to meet. Scheduling displays at the door that show when the room is available and how long the current meeting has been running help to alleviate this problem. Pair it with an infrared occupancy sensor at the door and you can even automate the process so that if the room is unoccupied, the next group can claim it, even if it’s in the middle of a scheduled block.
Build wireless presentation into the room from the start
Nobody wants to rummage through an adapter drawer to find the right dongle for their laptop, and that’s why many companies are turning to wireless presentation and casting to avoid the hassle. It helps to increase the amount of time that a meeting can actually spend meeting, rather than fighting over laptop connections, which adds up for companies with dozens of meetings a day. Every minute spent casting is a minute not spent wrestling with the cable.
Plan a refresh roadmap in advance
Displays and codecs have a five-to-seven year lifespan, at which point they’ll need to be refreshed. Furniture has a much longer lifespan; a good table may well last the decade-plus of a typical office lease. That’s why planning modular components into a room at time of purchase is so important. If you design in the ability to refresh certain components, the lifespan of the conference room as a whole can be considerably extended. Rooms that don’t follow this practice are much more likely to need a full overhaul, because the entire room needs to be gutted rather than a few outdated components replaced.
Why it matters as companies scale
Meetings aren’t free or insignificant. Senior executives currently spend 23 hours per week in meetings compared to 10 hours per week in the 1960s. Put another way, over half a typical workweek is spent in rooms that either work or don’t work for meetings. The cumulative effect of 5 minutes of AV hiccups across dozens of meetings and dozens of employees is significant, not just for the C-suite, whose time is especially constrained, but for the teams that are actually having the meetings.
It compounds over time, and it becomes a real problem for the business because room by room, that wasted time adds up to the same number of AV tickets, the same number of IT escalations, the same number of back-and-forth conversations with facilities about finding the right furniture. This is why companies that have scaled up tend to have poor meeting infrastructure: the more rooms there are, the more difficult it is to test and troubleshoot them all. The solution isn’t bigger budgets for higher-end equipment. It’s designing in planning and standardization rather than leaving it to the furniture catalog. The same principles apply when it’s time to refresh that outdated AV gear in a few years. Get that planning right once and you’ll never have to wrestle with the same problems across all your conference rooms.
