Meeting rooms for more equitable meetings: 12 practical tips

"Building facilities, CTO’s and organizational teams need to get together and optimize the meeting experiences, because it’s costing businesses so much money. Often meeting rooms are done on a budget, rather than thinking about the productivity, efficiency and the great culture and inspiration they create."

Matt Chadder, CEO and founder of Instinct laboratory stresses the importance of office (re)designs. A meeting room can be set up, equipped and decorated to make the people in that room more collaborative, creative and interactive.

Playing with geometry (e.g. round tables), lighting, temperature, air quality and adding the right furniture and tech tools (on the exact right locations) can have a profound impact on how people communicate, deal with conflict, cooperate, interact and collaborate.

When bringing in remote participants to your hybrid meetings, the concept creation of meeting spaces becomes even more complex. In video meetings people suddenly become very self-conscious, meeting dynamics change and surroundings play a large role.

Better collaboration is no longer about just productivity, interactivity or time efficiency, it is also about creating high-quality, life-like video and audio experiences and giving everyone an equal share of voice, both inside and outside the room.

“Before, meeting room designs were very in-room centric, with a use case of only 10% of attendees that are not present in the room. Today that percentages goes up to 79% on average. There is no one room design that fits all, as these percentages keep on changing.”

Scott Walker, President of Waveguide LLC, underlines the importance of the right ecosystem design for video collaboration spaces. Employees have been living meeting equity the past two years being away from the office, now with the return to the office they are suddenly faced with meeting inequity. The right room design and ecosystem can help counter that feeling of inequality for remote users.