Setting Up a Small Video Conferencing Room

The small meeting room has become a backbone of many businesses, with firms of all sizes investing in smaller meeting spaces to accommodate the regular flow of meetings with groups of up to 8 people. Even with the best video conferencing equipment for small businesses however, a meeting room is useless without setting up your equipment and space properly.

When we talk about setting up a small video conferencing room, it’s important to make a distinction between the setup of the equipment and creating a brand new meeting space from scratch. As we’ve covered the essentials of what a video conference is, 6 must haves for a great video conference and how to set up the perfect video conference we’re going to look at how to set up a small conference room.

Finding The Perfect Small Meeting Room

If you’re going to create a new small meeting space to make the most of your small business video conferencing equipment, you need to start with the meeting space itself. If you get this decision wrong, everything else which follows on just won’t work, equipment won’t fit and the space will become unusable as colleagues struggle to hold meetings.

What’s The Purpose of The Meeting Room

A good place to start is by thinking about the purpose of the meeting and video conference room you’re trying to set up. What do you actually want to do in the space, are you going to use the space for meetings with colleagues, or is there the possibility that you’ll be calling clients from the meeting room?

These might seem like small things, but they can help you decide on the facilities you need, for example connectivity to allow people to connect laptops to any screens in the room.

Can You Eliminate Noise?

If you’re creating a new meeting space, what’s the background noise like? Is the staff canteen on the other side of a wall or is there a busy main road outside a window? Both of these are great examples of noise which could really impact the usability of a room as users may be distracted or difficult to hear with an abundance of noise.

Another consideration is that if you can hear noise from another room in your meeting space, there’s the possibility that the conversations in your meeting space could be heard from another room, reducing the security of your space.

Does The Space Already Exist

Not all meeting offices feature lots of rooms and even those that do will have a great space for a small video conferencing room.

If you’re in this situation, it’s worth considering whether the room you’re looking for already exists or whether you might find more value in building a new room specifically for the purpose of remote meetings. This might seems like an extreme measure, but there are benefits to building a new space from the ground up:

• Meets your exact needs
• Hide cabling
• Incorporate connectivity
• Ensuring great lighting
• Incorporate sound deadening

This is of course the more expensive route to creating a great small business conferencing space, but this needs to be balanced against meeting the needs of the users and the long term value of a purpose built space.

What Is The Light Like?

While light is important in allowing your video conference camera to capture a good image, it’s also important in ensuring colleagues want to use a space, who wants to be sat in a dark cupboard?

This doesn’t mean that if you’re setting up a small video conference room you must use an exterior wall, but consider the lighting options you have for a space. You could use a glass wall to allow more light into a space, or perhaps a light tube, or simply invest in more manufactured lighting options.

Connectivity

Imagine, you’ve created a warm, welcoming meeting space only to find that when you try to connect to a video meeting the picture is distorted and the audio is jumpy. Ensuring your prospective meeting space has good connectivity is essential.

Involve your IT team or consultant in the process to ensure that any meeting space has good enough connectivity for the uses for which the space is intended.

Create A Welcoming Space

We’ve all been in a dreadful meeting space, dark, unwelcoming, unimaginative decor; these spaces aren’t conducive to creative thinking, collaboration or cooperation.

With so many examples of high quality, welcoming meeting spaces available it’s not hard to see the difference that a well thought out and designed space can make. From making a space feel more calming, encouraging free thinking and just being a nice space to be, a welcoming meeting space is more likely to be used than a plain white box and more importantly is more likely to lead to productive meetings.

At this point you might also want to think about the acoustics, if the room creates an echo, you can incorporate sound deadening panels into any room design. This seamless integration of form and function can contribute to making a space more welcoming.

Make Your Space Permanent

Any investment in a new meeting space needs to increase output for your business, and while it may be tempting to simply get hold of the latest small business video conferencing equipment and add it to an existing meeting room, this can often lead to a setup which feels temporary.

Why does this matter though? Taking the time to install equipment properly, run cables through ducting and providing easy access to any connectors will make your new meeting space feel more permanent and a more usable space. This in turn will encourage users into the space to make use of the facilities and improve the value that your new meeting space provides.

Choose The Best Equipment

You can have the best small meeting space in the world with the best design and decor, but without high quality video conference equipment, that space will be pretty much useless for video conferencing.

Yes, laptops have webcams and mics built in, but the quality of these are never as good as a standalone, purpose built meeting room webcam with integrated mics. For example the field of view is often narrow, meaning that your laptop camera just won’t capture everyone in the room.

The right equipment can also enhance and fit into a meeting room seamlessly, becoming part of the design rather than feeling like an afterthought. Purpose built options such as the JPL Agora 4K video conference camera not only provides crystal clear image quality but also integrated full duplex microphones to make sure everyone can be heard.

Integrated audio and video options such as this also help to reduce clutter on any meeting room surfaces, without the need for additional microphones or control units.

Test Your New Space

So you’ve set up a new, purpose built small video conferencing room and you’re keen to start using it to win new business, wow existing clients and see a return on your investment.

Before you jump into those all important calls though, it’s essential that you test your new equipment. There’s nothing more embarrassing than dialling into that important call and not being able to connect or share content as you expected.

Create Great Connections With JPL

If you’re creating a new, or revamping an existing meeting space, speak to our video conferencing experts who are well placed to help you work out the best equipment for your new space. No pressure, no hard sell, just good honest advice to help you make an informed choice.