Every organisation that went hybrid discovered the same thing within a month: the meeting room that worked perfectly for eight people around a table stops working the moment two of them join from home. The screen is too small, the camera frames the wrong end of the table, and the people on the call hear the air conditioning better than they hear each other. This article collects what we have learned from rooms we have designed and supported over the past year, and what we would do differently.
Start with the room, not the equipment
It is tempting to begin with a product list. A better starting point is the room itself: its size, its shape, the materials on its walls and ceiling, and above all what people actually do in it. A room used for quick stand-ups needs something very different from a boardroom where decisions are made over two hours.
We ask facility teams to spend one week noting how each room is used. The result is almost always surprising: rooms booked for twelve are used by three, and the small huddle space everyone ignores turns out to host most of the video calls.
Once the use is clear, the equipment follows from it rather than the other way round.
Three questions to ask before you specify anything
- Who is in the room, and who is not? The remote participants are the people most likely to have a bad experience, so design for them first.
- Where do people sit and face? Camera and microphone placement depend on it, and so does the choice between:
- a single all-in-one video bar for rooms up to six people,
- ceiling microphones and a separate camera for anything larger.
- Who will support it? A system that needs a specialist every time a setting changes will not be kept working.
What good audio sounds like
People will forgive a grainy picture. They will not forgive audio they have to strain to follow. Four things make the difference:
- Coverage: every seat is picked up at the same level, whether it is next to the microphone or at the far end of the table.
- Echo cancellation that keeps up when two people speak at once.
- Noise reduction that removes the projector fan without making voices sound processed.
- Automatic gain, so a quiet speaker is not lost next to a loud one.
We spent our budget on the biggest screen we could find. What people complained about was the sound, and within a month we had moved the money to microphones.
Facilities manager, professional services firm
Measuring whether it worked
Satisfaction surveys help, but usage data is more honest. Compare bookings with actual occupancy, track how often calls start late because of technical problems, and ask support how many tickets each room generates. A room of 20 m2 that serves eight people well should generate almost none.
| Room type | Typical size | Seats | Recommended audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Huddle | 8–12 m² | 2–4 | All-in-one video bar |
| Meeting room | 15–25 m² | 6–8 | Video bar with an extension microphone |
| Boardroom | 30–50 m² | 10–16 | Ceiling microphones and a DSP |
For larger projects the same thinking extends across every room in the building. The overview below is a starting point for a conversation, not a specification.
| Room type | Typical size | Seats | Microphones | Loudspeakers | Camera | Typical use |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Focus room | 4–6 m² | 1–2 | Built into the video bar | Built into the video bar | Fixed, wide angle | One-to-one calls and focused work |
| Huddle | 8–12 m² | 2–4 | Built into the video bar | Built into the video bar | Fixed, wide angle | Quick check-ins and stand-ups |
| Small meeting room | 12–18 m² | 4–6 | One extension microphone | Built into the video bar | Auto-framing | Team meetings with remote colleagues |
| Medium meeting room | 18–25 m² | 6–8 | Two ceiling microphones | Two ceiling loudspeakers | Auto-framing | Client calls and project reviews |
| Large meeting room | 25–35 m² | 8–12 | Three ceiling microphones | Four ceiling loudspeakers | Speaker tracking | Workshops and planning sessions |
| Boardroom | 30–50 m² | 10–16 | Four ceiling microphones | Six ceiling loudspeakers | Two cameras, speaker tracking | Board meetings and executive calls |
| Training room | 40–80 m² | 20–40 | Ceiling array and a presenter microphone | Distributed ceiling loudspeakers | Presenter tracking | Courses, onboarding and town halls |
| Divisible room | 60–120 m² | 30–80 | Ceiling arrays per section | Zoned loudspeakers per section | One camera per section | Events that split into breakout sessions |
A note on maintenance
Firmware updates, room scheduling and remote monitoring are easy to postpone until something breaks. Plan for them from the start: a room you can see from a dashboard is a room you can fix before the next meeting begins. We used to recommend a quarterly monthly visit to every room; with remote monitoring, most teams now only go when an alert tells them to.
A typical meeting room after installation, with the microphones in the ceiling and the camera below the screen.
Further reading
About this article
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