The small meeting room was already gaining popularity before the pandemic as companies explored the benefits of agile, innovative huddle rooms. Now, however, the evolution of the workplace, focused on agile, flexible, and hybrid work styles, has increased demand for small meeting rooms again.

With around 65% of employees expecting to work remotely at least part-time, many companies are reducing their office spaces, switching large board rooms and multi-office environments for simpler environments and splitting into zones for different types of work.

In this landscape, meeting rooms are still essential to bridging the gaps between distributed employees and enhancing collaboration. However, designing a small meeting room for the age of hybrid work requires a combination of creativity and strategy. Here’s how companies can adapt their existing small meeting rooms to support the future of work.

What is a Small Meeting Room for Hybrid Work?

Small meeting rooms are more versatile than many companies realize. They can include everything from dedicated huddle rooms to “focus space” meeting rooms and traditional office spaces converted into meeting rooms with plug-and-play technology.

What makes a small meeting room a space for hybrid work is the careful consideration of how you can bridge the gaps between in-office employees and their remote counterparts. While a traditional small meeting room may only need a desk, chairs, and a whiteboard, rooms for hybrid work need access to collaboration technology, video cameras, audio systems, and more.

Focusing on inclusivity is the key to success when adapting a small meeting room for hybrid work. As leaders like Microsoft have noted, many hybrid rooms offer fantastic experiences to in-office employees, but remote team members often feel excluded from the conversation.

A genuinely effective hybrid room must ensure every attendee has a voice, can contribute to the conversation, and feels “present” in the experience.

How to Adapt Your Small Meeting Room for Hybrid Work

The exact strategy you use to adapt your small meeting room for hybrid work will vary depending on numerous factors. You’ll need to consider the size of your space, the number of employees collaborating at any given time, and even the type of work they do.

Here are some critical steps to optimize your new hybrid meeting space.

Step 1: Examine Your Hybrid Meeting Room Needs

Before you invest in equipment and furniture, do some research. Measure your small meeting room and consider how many people will use it at any given time. If you have more remote employees than in-person staff, the ideal small meeting room might be a simple “hub” with a couple of chairs and a display.

If you need small groups in the office to collaborate with external employees, you might need a slightly larger space, with a desk and a whiteboard. Most “small” meeting rooms only accommodate up to 6 people at a time, but they can vary in design based on the work to be done.

For instance, you might have separate small rooms for private calls and focus work, huddles and 1:1 meetings, and brainstorming or breakout sessions. Alternatively, you might use a single room for every small meeting requirement and leverage plug-and-play room kits so your employees can adapt the space to their needs.

Step 2: Rethink the Small Meeting Room Design

In the past, smaller meeting rooms were often very similar to large conference rooms, the major difference being their size. However, in a small meeting room for hybrid work, the traditional layout may not promote a feeling of inclusion for remote workers.

Global research suggests many people still don’t feel satisfied with spaces for hybrid collaboration, thanks mainly to their layout. There are a few different configurations you can consider that might be better suited to hybrid work, such as:

  • Portrait to landscape: Change the room’s orientation so that employees are facing the longer wall in the space. This gives more room for a large display and ensures people on both sides of the camera can be seen and heard.
  • Corners to curves: Replace rectangular tables with curved or rounded options that revolve around a meeting room display and camera. Rectangles can stack people on video conferences, while rounded shapes create better sightlines for every participant.
  • Think about sound masking: Consider how you can prevent distractions outside the meeting room from disrupting your teams and vice versa. Look into sound masking and soundproofing solutions to facilitate concentration.

Step 3: Consider Your Small Meeting Room Software

Software is essential to any hybrid meeting room setup. First, you need collaboration and video conferencing software like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or Webex. If your employees prefer to use different types of software for collaboration, ensuring your meeting room hardware can support all options is essential to preserving productivity.

Next, consider the other collaborative tools your team members may need to share information and content in a hybrid setting. Do you need solutions for digital whiteboarding, file and screen sharing, and hosting presentations?

Finally, consider small meeting room management. If you have one or multiple meeting rooms and remote employees, you’ll need software, such as Logitech Sync, to help you keep track of your hardware and issue updates and patches quickly.

If you’re running multiple meeting and focus rooms simultaneously, you may need booking software to prevent overlap and ensure resources are distributed effectively.

Step 4: Examine Your Display Options

Since video is often essential for bridging the gaps between hybrid workers, displays will play a crucial role in your small meeting room. Depending on the size of your space, you might choose a large display or “video wall” that covers an entire portion of the space. The bigger the screen, the more of a “presence” remote workers will have in your space.

Alternatively, suppose you want to ensure remote workers feel like they have a seat at the table. In that case, you might use multiple smaller displays or tablets with 360-degree cameras situated around the room. For instance, you could consider the “Neat Frame” for each remote worker.

If your teams are sharing and working together on content simultaneously, you may have one large display for video streams and multiple tablets where in-office employees can interact with shared content. If you’re unsure of the proper configuration, try talking to your teams.

Step 5: Prioritize Excellent Video Solutions

Speaking of video, in a small meeting room for hybrid work, the video tools you use will likely be very different from those in larger conference rooms. Field of view is a significant consideration for a small room or huddle space. You need to ensure your camera has a wide-angle lens so that it can capture all of the people in the space at the same time.

Intelligent cameras equipped with AI can be particularly valuable. They can automatically detect speakers in a room and focus on them even when moving around the office. They can also zoom out automatically for a broader group view when necessary.

Some software solutions can even enhance the video experience. For instance, Zoom’s Smart Gallery uses AI to detect the individual faces of in-person participants and pull them into the screen to create a classic “gallery view” experience for remote team members.

Step 6: Don’t Forget High-Quality Sound

Alongside the video, ensure you have high-quality audio solutions throughout your meeting space. Hybrid rooms need microphones that can pick up audio in a 360-degree range, minimizing the risk of lost clarity for people sitting on the side of a table.

A small meeting room for hybrid work should also include the right speakers to ensure every remote employee has a clear voice in the conversation. These speakers should be able to relay audio clearly, with minimal background noise and disruption. They should also take up as little space in the office environment as possible.

If you want to keep your meeting spaces compact and uncluttered, consider using video bars, which combine speakers, cameras, and microphones into a single plug-and-play solution. Alternatively, you could equip each employee with a headset to reduce noise and distractions in a focus-room-style space.

Step 7: Simplify Setup and Offer Agaility

If your workforce participates in many smaller meetings and brainstorming sessions, you might not have the space required to create multiple dedicated huddle rooms or conference spaces. Instead, you may need to give your employees the freedom to instantly turn any space into a meeting room.

Room kits are excellent for this. Meeting room kits created by companies like Microsoft and Zoom can be explicitly designed for the small meeting room. They can include everything from cameras and audio equipment to screens and displays. Plus, they offer a plug-and-play experience, requiring minimal technical setup, so ad-hoc meetings are easier to facilitate.

It’s also worth considering other ways to simplify the meeting setup experience, such as giving users access to “room controllers” that allow them to use their voice to access crucial software. Or you can create meeting rooms that support multiple devices, from laptops to smartphones, for better BYOD (Bring your own Device) flexibility.

Step 8: Implement Strategies for Success

Finally, once you have the perfect design for your small meeting room for hybrid work, think about the policies you can implement to facilitate better collaboration. For instance, set up inclusive protocols that ensure all attendees (remote and in-house) have equal opportunity to participate in the conversation. Give attendees various ways to join a meeting, from video conferencing to audio call-in and even messaging options.

It’s also worth considering how to leverage new and emerging technologies to make your small meeting room more effective. For example, extended reality technologies can be an excellent way to transform a small meeting room into an infinitely versatile space.

With a virtual reality headset, a single person in an office can enter an environment with dozens of other employees and contacts and collaborate seamlessly in real-time.

Adapting your Small Meeting Room for Hybrid Work

Adapting a small meeting room for hybrid work doesn’t have to be as complex as it seems. However, it does require companies to rethink a few things. Carefully considering your meeting room layout and the technology you use is crucial to creating an inclusive experience for all employees.

As your workplace continues to evolve, your meeting rooms could evolve, too. It’s worth taking an agile approach to office design, introducing new focus spaces, extended reality, and intuitive solutions that empower and engage your staff.

The better your meeting rooms, the better your teams can collaborate, paving the way to greater innovation and productivity.



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