Make every meeting work: Rethink the modern meeting room

A meeting room can work perfectly well on its own and still be part of an environment that does not work.

In a global organization, these rooms may use different platforms and devices, and have different designs and support arrangements. The experience can vary from one office to the next, while IT and workplace teams manage a patchwork of technologies with limited visibility of how rooms are performing.

Hybrid work has made this fragmentation harder to ignore. A meeting that once brought everyone around the same table may now connect colleagues, customers and partners across offices, homes and locations around the world. Everyone needs to see, hear and contribute easily, wherever they join.

To make the entire meeting environment work better, you need a connected environment that delivers a consistent employee experience and remains manageable across the organization.

Smart meeting rooms do more than enable collaboration

Over the next three to five years, several developments will bring the design and management of meeting rooms into focus as key to the smart office.

First on the list is, of course, AI. New capabilities in AI-supported collaboration will go beyond transcription and summaries to provide insights and recommendations, while AI-driven monitoring can identify performance issues before they disrupt a meeting. Support can become more proactive as a result. AI can make that experience richer.

AV and IT are also converging. As audiovisual technologies become more IP-based, meeting rooms will rely more on networks, cybersecurity and the wider IT environment. Decisions about collaboration technology can no longer be made in isolation from the infrastructure that supports it.

Meeting-room data will play a wider role. By combining information about room use, occupancy, technology performance and employee experience with energy and space-planning data, workplace teams can build a clearer picture of how their offices are being used.

Technology lifecycles are changing. Refresh programs can incorporate responsible disposal, recycling and second-life asset management alongside broader sustainability goals.

Office design is evolving around those needs. Collaboration areas, project rooms, huddle spaces and video-enabled environments are becoming more important as organizations rethink how people use the office. For workplace leaders, the focus is shifting from simply providing technology to creating spaces that support productive interaction.

We support this broader approach through our employee collaboration portfolio, which includes hybrid meeting rooms and lifecycle support across collaboration workloads.

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Hybrid work has raised expectations of the meeting room

As meeting rooms become more connected, expectations of the experience inside them are changing too.

Video-enabled collaboration is now part of everyday work. People in the office need to interact easily with colleagues, customers and partners joining remotely. The experience should feel intuitive, whether someone is presenting from the room or contributing from thousands of miles away.

Aon encountered this challenge as hybrid work and remote client interactions grew across their operations in Brazil. Multiple videoconferencing platforms and infrastructure limitations were affecting meeting efficiency and the experience of employees and clients. Working with NTT DATA, Aon standardized their collaboration platforms, upgraded meeting-room technology, redesigned spaces and introduced monitoring tools. As a result, videoconferencing capacity tripled and client meetings increased by 50%.

In practice, that means providing enough video-enabled spaces, a familiar experience from one room to the next and reliable access to cloud collaboration platforms. To create that consistency, you need clear standards for the platforms, hardware and room configurations you deploy.

Manageability needs to be considered from the start. Bring-your-own-device (BYOD) rooms, for example, can reduce the technology required in a space, but connected peripherals still need to be monitored and supported. A design that is easy to deploy but difficult to manage can create problems further down the line.

Global consistency requires global coordination

Global organizations face another consideration: consistency across countries.

One region chooses one vendor. Another makes a different choice. A provider may perform well in one market but struggle to deliver the same level of service elsewhere. Facilities and IT teams manage separate investments, while local AV integrators introduce their own technologies and standards. Years later, the organization is left managing the combined result.

For employees, that can mean different interfaces, devices and room configurations whenever they change locations. Differences in room design and AV integration can also affect audio and video quality.

For IT and workplace teams, fragmentation makes the environment harder to understand. Which rooms are heavily used? Where do failures keep occurring? Which spaces need an upgrade? Which are sitting empty? Without this visibility, support tends to become reactive. When a room fails, employees may simply move elsewhere rather than report the problem and wait for help.

Through our Meeting Room as a Service (MRaaS) offering, we can help address these problems by bringing design, deployment, monitoring, support and technology refresh into a coordinated lifecycle. Common standards can reduce variation between locations, while centralized monitoring gives support teams a clearer view of room and technology performance.

Instead of relying on employees to report every fault, teams can identify recurring problems and address them before they disrupt another meeting.

A lifecycle approach can simplify meeting-room management

A lifecycle approach can also simplify how meeting rooms are managed over time.'4

Room design, procurement, deployment, support and technology refresh are often managed as separate activities. MRaaS brings them together under one model that covers design and standardization, procurement, installation, monitoring, managed support, technology refresh, asset lifecycle management, decommissioning and recycling.

This reduces the number of disconnected suppliers, technologies and support arrangements that IT and workplace teams need to coordinate. It can also make deployments more consistent across locations and give employees the same experience as they move between offices.

The model can change financial planning too. Rather than relying only on periodic capital investments for major technology refreshes, organizations can move toward more predictable operational costs and plan technology lifecycles over time. Consolidating requirements across countries and regions can also simplify procurement and reduce the administrative burden of local purchasing.

The right model will depend on the organization. The number of rooms, required service levels and pace of deployment all affect the economics. Realistic volume commitments and a phased rollout can help balance consistency with operational needs.

Better meeting rooms can support better workplace decisions

When meeting rooms work as part of a connected environment, they can also help organizations make better workplace decisions.

For CIOs, digital workplace and smart office leaders, data from those spaces can reveal how meeting rooms are performing, how employees use them and where problems persist. Combined with occupancy, space utilization and employee-experience data, it can provide a broader view of how the workplace is functioning.

Workplace teams can also learn from what happens behind the scenes. Data on room use, occupancy, employee experience and technology performance can help answer practical questions. Where is more capacity needed? Which spaces are underused? Where should technology be refreshed? Which locations need more support? As working patterns continue to change, these signals can also help organizations decide how their offices should evolve.

But those wider benefits depend on getting the fundamentals right. Meeting spaces still need to be reliable, manageable and easy to use. Employees should be able to enter a room, start a meeting and focus on the conversation rather than the technology. People joining remotely should be able to see, hear and contribute just as effectively. When either group has to work around the room instead of simply using it, the experience has failed.

By connecting meeting spaces with the wider smart office, organizations can improve collaboration for employees while gaining the insight they need to make better workplace decisions. A lifecycle approach such as MRaaS can help provide that foundation while making the environment easier to manage and adapt over time.

What to do next

Read more about NTT DATA’s Smart Office solutions to see how we help create intelligence workspaces that inspire people and boost performance.