Designing affordable meeting rooms that still contribute to exceptional productivity and collaboration can seem challenging. Business leaders know they need to invest in cutting-edge software and hardware to unify their teams and enhance communications.
However, as economic uncertainty worsens, every organization also needs to find ways of doing more with less. In 2024, enterprise leaders are cutting back on hardware, talent acquisition, and software expenses. Some companies are investing in more small meeting rooms and focus spaces to reduce their reliance on excessive real estate and empower hybrid work.
The question is, how do you build impressive small meeting rooms that adhere to your budget without compromising on functionality? Here’s your guide to affordable meeting rooms in 2024.
7 Tips for Building Affordable Meeting Rooms
Investing in small meeting rooms can be a good way to reduce the costs of enabling collaboration in your business.
Smaller meeting spaces, designed to flexibly adapt to various use cases, from client conferences to brainstorming sessions, can reduce the costs of equipping large conferencing spaces. Plus, they can help enable hybrid and remote work, allowing teams to work together more effectively, regardless of location.
However, there are some ways you can design more affordable meeting rooms with the right strategy. Here are our top tips for success.
1. Retain Your Existing Investments
Even if you’re recreating your entire office space for the future of work, replacing large conference rooms with segmented focus spaces, and investing in new concepts like hot desking and office neighborhoods, you may have some of the existing tools you need to build affordable meeting rooms.
You may have speakerphones you can use in smaller conferencing spaces, webcams used by individual employees that are ideal for huddle rooms, or even critical meeting software. Taking an inventory of your existing resources, then looking for solutions that integrate and align with those solutions will help you to save money on a rip-and-replace strategy.
When you’re designing affordable meeting rooms, look for the resources you can keep and continue to use in the years ahead. Scalable, flexible technologies, such as software-agnostic hardware and hardware-agnostic software, will help you maximize your investment.
2. Choose Multifunctional Displays
Displays are often a critical part of any well-designed meeting room. They’re crucial for sharing knowledge and content across multifunctional teams. However, displays can be expensive, particularly if you’re investing in multiple solutions for conferencing and collaboration.
To reduce the cost of your affordable meeting rooms, look for displays that can act as more than just a screen. Exploring interactive display options with touch-screen components can help you instantly transform a display into a digital whiteboard for creative brainstorming sessions.
Finding displays with their own built-in speakers and high-quality video conferencing cameras already built-in can help you avoid investing in additional hardware. You can even reduce the need for additional displays and tablets by supporting “BYOD” (Bring Your Own Device) policies.
Ensuring employees can rapidly connect to a display with their smartphone or tablet and a wireless connection means everyone on your team can bring content into a meeting and even control room system settings without needing additional tech. This strategy also reduces the space you need in each meeting room.
3. Equip Affordable Meeting Rooms with All-in-One Tech
Speaking of streamlining and simplifying your meeting room hardware, another way to create affordable meeting rooms without compromising performance is to explore other types of “all-in-one” tech kits. Video bars like those offered by Bose and Neat have become increasingly popular in small meeting spaces.
First, these all-in-one hardware options offer a fantastic plug-and-play experience for employees, making it easier to set up meeting spaces and dive straight into conferencing sessions. Secondly, they reduce the space consumed in a room by combining speakers, microphones, and cameras into a single device.
What’s more, with everything you need in one convenient bar, you won’t need to spend as much on advanced camera systems and audio technology for your meeting rooms. There are plenty of options to choose from in today’s market. You can even check out solutions from companies like Owl Labs, which produce desk-based all-in-one speakers, microphones, and camera systems specially designed for smaller meeting spaces.
4. Explore Hardware as a Service and Hiring Options
As the world of work continues to change and the meeting preferences of employees evolve, many leading vendors are offering companies new ways to invest in technology. While you can purchase scalable solutions outright, you can also consider more budget-friendly deployment options. For instance, hardware as a service solutions are a great way to keep costs low.
Hardware or meeting room as a service solution providers allow companies to hire or rent the equipment they need for meeting spaces on a pay-as-you-go basis. This means you can access additional equipment when demand for meeting spaces increases, and scale your environment accordingly. A hardware-as-a-service approach also has other benefits.
For instance, if your meeting room environments change or you discover new demands among your team members, you can change your hardware without losing out financially. Hardware as a service gives you the freedom and agility to adapt whenever you choose.
5. Prioritize Plug-and-Play Simplicity for Affordable Meeting Rooms
User experience should be a primary consideration for any company designing a meeting room, no matter its size or purpose. The more convenient your technology is to use, the more productive and efficient your teams will be. However, if your focus is on building affordable meeting rooms, plug-and-play simplicity is particularly crucial.
Investing in hardware that requires no technical expertise to set up and use means you don’t need another staff member on hand to configure a meeting space for every collaborative session. You can ensure your team members have more time to focus on other value-added tasks.
Simple technology doesn’t incur additional configuration and implementation costs. It can also mean your employees can transform any space into a meeting room with minimal effort. With the right tech, any available office or focus space can quickly become a collaborative environment, reducing the need to invest in “dedicated” meeting spaces.
6. Use Data to Your Advantage
Data is the key to making informed decisions whenever you’re investing in new technologies, processes, or strategies for business growth. Similarly, when you’re trying to design affordable meeting rooms, the right insights can guide you toward intelligent ways of using your budget.
Gathering insights from your meeting room management and booking software means you can identify which resources your employees need and use. You can determine how staff members are using meeting rooms already, and look for ways to reduce expenses by eliminating unnecessary hardware and licenses.
Your meeting room management technology can also help you to avoid financial losses caused by disruptions in productivity. Scheduling software ensures everyone in your team can make the most of your meeting spaces without the risk of “double booking.” Room and device management software ensures you can update and patch solutions remotely without hiring a technical expert to come in and handle maintenance on your behalf.
7. Don’t Overlook the Value of Innovation
Finally, when building affordable meeting rooms, it’s easy to ignore cutting-edge technologies and innovations that may initially seem more expensive. However, the right innovations can help you to save money and increase profitability in the long term.
For instance, investing in AI-powered cameras and speakers can save your team time taking notes, summarizing meetings, and configuring meeting spaces to ensure exceptional communication quality and clarity. Intelligent booking software can help you organize and distribute resources more effectively and reduce redundancies.
Even extended reality technologies, like metaverse spaces and virtual reality headsets, can save you money on travel, hosting in-person events, and physical resources like whiteboards and paper. When you’re investing in new technology, make sure you think about the long-term returns on innovative investments, not just the short-term costs.
Building Affordable Meeting Rooms for the Future of Work
Designing affordable meeting rooms doesn’t have to be as complicated as it seems. The right approach to small meeting room design can significantly reduce operational costs while improving productivity and employee engagement.
By leveraging your existing technology, exploring different deployment methods, choosing innovative hardware, and using data to your advantage, you can create an incredible meeting space without unnecessary cost.
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