How to set up a meeting room for video conferencing
Business success starts in your conference rooms. In modern work, employees prefer flexible schedules, and many clients and partners choose to meet virtually instead of traveling to your office. This means that the power to collaborate, communicate, and close deals relies on how well your rooms enable inclusive video conferencing.
This requires solutions that allow everyone to be clearly seen and heard, no matter what size the room is or where they’re sitting. It also means selecting features that enable everyone to stay engaged in the discussion and fully participate, sharing ideas easily, wherever they are.
Here are four considerations to help you get video conferencing right.
1. Determine the size and intention of your meeting rooms
All meeting spaces need to be equipped so remote people can join the conversation, including some that have been overlooked in the past. Let’s look at the four most common types of meeting rooms in modern offices.
Focus spaces. Designed for the smallest meetings, like 1-on-1s, quick syncs, and impromptu discussions, focus spaces provide a private, quiet place to connect. Adding video to focus spaces can also help to save your larger spaces for larger meetings.
Huddle and small rooms. These rooms are larger than focus spaces, but still enable closeness among small groups for brainstorming, team meetings, retrospective sessions, and client calls.
Medium rooms. These rooms expand the number of employees who can attend sessions including team meetings, retrospectives, product demos, whiteboarding, and in-person client briefs.
Large rooms. Your largest rooms are designed to bring the most people together for whiteboarding and brainstorming, all-employee meetings, training sessions, and high impact client calls.
One more space you may want to enable for video if you have it, is the stand-up area. Daily, short stand-up meetings are a key element of agile processes, and it’s important that these sessions include team members who aren’t working from the office that day. Adding video to your stand-up areas makes that experience more productive than an audio-only call.
2. Identify your preferred video conference partners
If your business has chosen a single unified communications platform, such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or Google Meet, it makes sense to start by looking at solutions certified for that software. But it’s also important to find a solution that can smoothly accommodate other platforms that may be used by partners and clients. Naturally, if your business uses multiple platforms in-house, it’s essential to find video conferencing equipment with the flexibility to work easily across all of them.
3. Choose between bring-your-own-device solutions and all-in-one video conferencing devices.
Bring-your-own-device (BYOD) solutions make it easy to connect to any meeting platform. The presenter brings their laptop, connects it to the video conferencing system via a USB cable, and can immediately start the meeting. These solutions can’t run without having a computer attached, but they combine affordability with increased presenter control and high-quality video and audio for successful collaboration.
All-in-one devices integrate high-quality video and audio with the codec software that allows them to be used without attaching a computer. If they are certified for Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, or Zoom, you know they will work easily with that platform. These solutions require a larger upfront investment than BYOD, but because they contain everything necessary for successful meetings, they are more intuitive to use.
4. Look for smart technology features
You want to create the best meeting experience – on both sides of the call – in all your meeting spaces. Intelligent technology makes it simple with features including:
Automatic speaker framing and tracking. A camera that automatically zooms in on the speaker and follows them as they move around the room helps to keep everyone engaged in the discussion.
Group framing. The ability of the camera to automatically pan and frame so everyone in the room can be clearly seen, even as people enter and leave the room.
Blocking noise in the room. The more people in the room, the more chance that there will be typing, rustling papers, side conversations, and other noises. Noise-blocking technology can stop them from becoming a distraction.
Stopping outside noise. Office bustle, hallway conversations, and other noises can creep into your meeting spaces. Smart technology can keep them from affecting the meeting discussion.
The video conferencing solutions you choose for your meeting rooms can make it easy to improve collaboration quality and have more productive meetings. Taking these four considerations into account will help you identify the best solutions for your spaces, your people, and your business.
See all our resources to help you set up your meeting spaces for successful collaboration.