How To Set Up Your Huddle Room’s Conferencing System
Huddle rooms are proving to be a lasting development in modern offices as younger workers prefer a small and secluded space for uninterrupted, informal collaboration sessions. Just because the space is limited doesn’t mean it’s any less important to plan out the room’s layout, however - creating a slapdash DIY solution leads to poor quality calls and useless space. To help you create a small but effective conference room, we’ve created a guide that will ensure your employees will use your huddle room for years to come!
Display and Camera
While the space is small, that doesn’t mean you can get away with using a significantly smaller display – you don’t want people to have to squint or get closer to the display to see anything. 50” or more displays should be adequate for use as monitors to share PowerPoints, documents, and as a viewscreen during video conferences.
Depending on screen height, the camera should be mounted either above or below the display and have a field of view that will include every participant in the room at full capacity. Cameras that utilize automatic or manual zoom features, facial recognition software, and brightness/color correction software will make video conferences much more effective.
Audio Solution
Due to the relatively small space, organizations often believe that a simple microphone and speaker individually hooked up to the user’s computer will get the job done. But oftentimes, it just doesn’t cut it.
These items are often poorly optimized for the room, meaning that calls are often interrupted by audio disruptions like reverberation and echo. The lack of DSP (digital signal processor) also means that the microphone and speaker don’t work in tandem, leading the microphone to catch the sound coming from the speaker and repeat the speaker’s voice.
Huddle rooms need complete solutions just like any other conference room in order to get that seamless conferencing experience that makes them so popular. The best way to create that seamless experience is by using an audio ecosystem. Audio ecosystems use a combination of hardware and software to create higher-quality audio. The Stem Ecosystem, for example, uses up to 10 networked audio devices in conjunction with a powerful software platform to create a fully customized and complete audio solution.
The Stem Ecosystem provides users with four uniquely designed audio endpoints that can be mixed and matched to create a bespoke solution for any room. For simple and straightforward audio solutions, Stem speakerphones Table and Wall can be used as standalone devices that provide solid coverage for a Huddle room-sized space. For more complete coverage options, each Stem device can be used as part of a larger ecosystem, including Stem Speaker and Ceiling, which work perfectly as a team to cover your room as Ceiling collects audio from above the conferencing space and Speaker delivers crisp, clear audio for those present.
Each ecosystem comes with a three-step setup: place or mount your devices, make your connections and assign the devices to your room. This process can be completed in minutes, meaning you can finish multiple rooms in the space of an afternoon, making it the perfect solution for mass deployment for organizations looking to outfit many huddle rooms at once.
Furniture Arrangement
Huddle rooms provide a level of privacy and solitude that workers have come to love and long for thanks to hybrid and at-home work environments. Instead of blasting conversations out into an otherwise quiet and open office floor, many workers prefer taking their meetings into an open huddle room to get some peace and quiet where they don’t have to worry about bothering their coworkers.
Designing the room with this in mind means orienting the furniture so that the conferencing equipment can be used by one to four people. Table size and shape should allow for single users to sit at a ‘head’ where they can conduct solo conference calls, while also allowing for easy sightlines for local, smaller team meetings.
Huddle rooms are the perfect addition to your office to increase productivity and communications both within and without your organization. Set up properly, they can add a huge amount of value for a very minor cost. If you’d like to start designing the audio solution for your huddle rooms, check out our RoomDesign tool here to create a device mix before you buy a single item.
