Knowing how to effectively compare small meeting room tech and select the right resources for your evolving teams is becoming increasingly crucial. Small meeting rooms represent a valuable resource for businesses in all industries. Huddle rooms, miniature conference rooms, and even focus spaces enhance team productivity, enable collaboration, and can even improve customer experiences.

However, even as companies plan to increase their IT budgets in 2024, many are still looking for ways to reduce costs and accomplish more with less. Designing meeting rooms that are intuitive, valuable, and affordable requires a careful approach to comparing available solutions.

As more innovators enter the market, you need to decide how you’ll analyze new hardware and software for your small meeting rooms to ensure the best return on your investment.

How to Compare Small Meeting Room Tech

To effectively compare small meeting room tech, you need more than just a clear view of the available solutions. You need to understand how teams use your meeting spaces, what features and capabilities will enhance their performance, and which challenges you’ll need to overcome when optimizing office design.

Here’s your step-by-step guide to comparing small meeting room technology, informed by our years of experience working with meeting room vendors.

Step 1: Identify the Use Cases for Your Small Meeting Rooms

To compare small meeting room tech, you first need a clear insight into how your employees will use these spaces and their requirements. Small meeting rooms usually support up to 5 employees at once, but they can adapt to various use cases.

Some companies use their small meeting rooms as huddle spaces for creative brainstorming sessions and breakout sessions between remote and in-office employees. In these spaces, you may need to consider not just video cameras and audio equipment but collaborative content-sharing software, document cameras, and even digital whiteboards.

You may design other small meeting rooms with a focus on customer experience, creating environments where employees can communicate with customers, offer intuitive onboarding experiences, or present product demos. Determine whether you’ll be building a single small meeting space that adapts to any use case or multiple different spaces for each purpose.

Step 2: Look at Your Existing Resources

Today’s small meeting rooms need to be flexible, agile, and cost-effective. Before investing in new technology, you must understand which resources you already have and what solutions your team members rely on. For instance, if your employees depend on Microsoft Teams for collaboration, you’ll want to choose compatible software and hardware.

Selecting cameras, meeting room kits, and other solutions already certified for Microsoft Teams will allow you to sidestep any compatibility and integration issues. It also means you can save money on ripping out and replacing the technology you already have.

If your employees already have devices, they use to manage work and share knowledge, looking for small meeting room equipment that can align with those devices can be helpful too. A “bring your own device” or “bring your own meeting” approach to your meeting room design can make conference spaces more flexible and accessible.

Step 4: Compare Small Meeting Room Tech for Audio and Video

While numerous components are involved in building an effective meeting room environment, few things are more important than audio and video for collaboration. When you compare small meeting room tech, it’s crucial to ensure you’re empowering employees to work cohesively together with the proper collection of speakers, microphones, and cameras.

This is particularly relevant in today’s world, where in-office employees will need to regularly collaborate with remote contractors, colleagues, and customers. All-in-one solutions like video bars could be an excellent option for small meeting rooms. They combine the speakers, microphones, and cameras your teams need to conduct an effective meeting into a single solution.

You can look into plug-and-play options that allow your employees to turn any available space into a meeting room in seconds. Additionally, you can examine technologies that already have built-in solutions for enhancing meeting quality.

For instance, AI-powered systems can automatically clarify and enhance audio and visual signals and assist with note-taking and meeting summarization. Some AI cameras can even improve feelings of inclusion in small meeting rooms by automatically framing participants, tracking speakers, and assisting with language translation.

Step 5: Think Carefully About Displays

Displays can be a complicated component of a small meeting room. When you’re limited in space, the displays you use can sometimes be restrictive, too. However, they’re crucial to ensuring your team members can share knowledge and collaborate efficiently.

An all-in-one display, that combines an interactive touchscreen (for digital whiteboarding and collaboration), with a built-in camera and speakers can help enhance the quality of conferencing spaces, without taking up too much room. Alternatively, you could look into ceiling-mounted projectors with internet connectivity options for knowledge sharing.

You could also think about providing your team members with their own dedicated screens. Options like the “Neat Frame” can help improve connections between remote and in-office employees and ensure everyone feels like they have a seat at the table.

To keep costs low, ensure your screens and displays can connect seamlessly to the devices employees already use, such as tablets and smartphones, for instant content sharing.

Step 6: Compare Small Meeting Room Tech Kits and Accessories

If you’re searching for a simple and intuitive way to transform a small space into a meeting room, it might be time to compare small meeting room tech kits. All-in-one kits, specially designed for small meeting rooms, can give you everything you need to empower your teams in one bundle. They can combine displays, cameras, microphones, speakers, and more into an affordable package.

Most of these kits are designed to offer an intuitive, user-friendly experience with plug-and-play equipment that doesn’t require professional configuration. They can also be enhanced with portable digital whiteboards, daisy chain speakerphones, and tablets.

You may even explore more innovative small meeting room accessories to improve immersion and collaboration. Extended reality headsets and mixed reality systems can help enhance the sense of presence in a meeting room and unify distributed teams.

These technologies, combined with solutions like Microsoft Teams Immersive Spaces, are fantastic at submerging teams into digital spaces that lack the physical boundaries of smaller conference rooms.

Step 7: Consider Meeting Room and Device Management

When you compare small meeting room tech, it’s crucial to think not just about how you’ll configure your conference spaces but how you’ll manage your resources, too. Room management software, booking tools, and device management technology ensure you can make the most of your resources and share them effectively among teams.

Some meeting room solutions come with room management capabilities built-in, such as Microsoft Teams Rooms. There are also vendors in the hardware landscape that offer access to cloud-based tools for device management, like Logitech with the Logitech Sync platform.

For advanced meeting room booking features and insights into how employees use your technologies, you might decide to invest in specialist software. The right technology should ensure you can avoid issues like “double booking” meeting rooms and guarantee you’re using your meeting room budget as effectively as possible.

There are even tools that can help to protect employee comfort, by monitoring things like the number of attendees in a space, the temperature, or conditions of a meeting room, and more.

Step 8: Be Ready to Scale and Innovate

Finally, when you compare small meeting room tech for your teams, it’s important to think about potential future needs, as well as existing requirements. As the world of work continues to evolve, make sure the solutions you purchase can adapt and scale to suit changing dynamics.

The best meeting room technology vendors pave the way for continued innovation with hardware and software-agnostic solutions and options for endless integration. They also constantly invest in new ways to make their technology more innovative, with integrated AI-driven software, machine learning components, and more.

Investing in data-driven solutions can be helpful, too. Working with hardware and software vendors that offer access to meeting room analytics and critical metrics should help you make data-driven decisions about how to transform your workplace in the years to come.

Compare Small Meeting Room Tech the Right Way

The strategy you implement to compare small meeting room tech for your organization is crucial to ensuring you can promote exceptional collaboration and productivity in your business. Choosing the right solutions in the hardware and software landscape will empower your teams to accomplish more, regardless of what the future world of work might hold.

If you need more help choosing the right technology for your team, examine our market maps, and meeting room vendor reviews for behind-the-scenes insights into the best tech on the market.



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