Designing The Huddle Room: Things To Keep In Mind For Your Collaborative Spaces
In the past, large boardrooms equipped with every piece of conferencing equipment imaginable were a primary focus of many office space new builds and redesigns. Although still very much a staple, these more traditional conference rooms are quickly becoming overshadowed by the increased demand for smaller, functional breakout rooms. The modern workplace looks quite different from what many have seen in the past, and a growing number of organizations are turning to open floor plans and conferencing solutions that support remote work.
Enter: the Huddle Room, the small collaboration-promoting space designed for impromptu meetings and enhanced productivity. Huddle Rooms offer considerable benefits to the workspace and provide easy accessibly to tools not often found in personal offices or cubicles. To achieve these benefits, the design must focus on intuitiveness, and if it is the end-user experience that determines what technology is integrated, the result will be a practical, utilized office space.
Collaboration is what counts.
Huddle Rooms offer enhanced collaboration on the fly. Detailed invitations outlining conference lines and agendas are not required, and with the help of the right scheduling system, very little is needed for teammates to get to work.
While open floor plans come with their own list of benefits, they can deliver a distracting environment under certain circumstances, which may ultimately negatively impact productivity. By providing a team with a diverse selection of meeting spaces, businesses get the best of both worlds.
If you don't use it (the equipment), you lose it (the value).
In spaces that are purposed to be used by those with varying degrees of technical knowledge, the installed AV components must be straightforward to operate. If a piece of equipment is not intuitive or requires in-depth training to understand how it works, it will likely rarely get used.
Although Huddle Rooms can vary in complexity and range in features, there are a few critical pieces of equipment that every space should include. For starters, video conferencing is a non-negotiable element, and at the very least, should be equipped to offer seamless video and audio communications. There is a wide range of available solutions on the market that provide high-quality, all-in-one video conferencing, and with most being BYOD compatible, anyone can easily take ownership of a space.
With no end in sight for virtual meetings, a high-definition display, large enough to show both video participants and shared screen content, is another required piece of technology. Interactive Displays are worth considering for an even more collaborative experience, as their supporting software offers features like whiteboarding and real-time annotation, two qualities occasional lost during remote meetings. See here for some of our equipment recommendations.
Hassle-free scheduling.
Finally, to ensure uninterrupted meetings, room scheduling panels are a valuable technology to complete a Huddle Room design. They provide a straightforward method of reserving a room and are built to support the mobile workforce found within flexible work environments.
Room scheduling panels can be mounted on the wall just outside a Huddle Room and integrated with an organization's calendar software. Real-time room availability can be viewed and managed on the panel itself or accessed using a company calendar, making scheduling conflicts virtually obsolete.
Huddle Rooms are a simple, cost-efficient way for organizations to improve collaboration amongst teams, and when designed correctly, support productivity for both in-person and remote workers. Sometimes, smaller investments produce significant results, and the Huddle Room is a perfect example of a "do more for less" audio visual solution.