How to Best Design Your Meeting Rooms

A meeting room’s design can have a strong impact on employees and clients. Depending on its design and layout, a meeting room can help teams come up with fresh, creative ideas, or it can stifle them and make them feel uncomfortable and distracted.

Traditional conference rooms tend to consist of a long table dominating the room. While this style of room is appropriate for board of directors’ meetings and the like, modern meeting rooms tend to be more focused on comfort and creating a relaxed atmosphere. Well-designed meeting rooms help to put people at ease, improve collaboration, and enhance creativity.

If you want to infuse your meetings with productivity and innovation, consider following these tips to improve the look and feel of your meeting rooms.

Understand Your Team’s Needs

How does your team like to work? Do they work as a large group or break up into smaller groups? Is the meeting room going to be client-facing or only for internal clients? Does the room need to be located close to where employees work, or should it be a bit removed to give attendees privacy? These are some questions you should ask yourself when deciding on the size and location of the meeting room.

Choose the Right Table Configuration and Equipment

There are many different table configurations that you could choose from. The U-shaped table configuration is ideal if you want to give people the ability to engage with a speaker. If there will be one person speaking at a time and a larger audience, then a theater-style room is probably the most appropriate.

It’s important to understand how a meeting room will be used. Will people need to move their chairs around? Then you need a room that has plenty of space to allow for moving around. Will meeting attendees need to swivel their chairs to look at a screen? Then you need chairs on casters that can swivel. If a meeting room is going to be used for creative work, provide attendees with different types of seating and a more open layout.

Think about the types of supplies and equipment you might need. Will you need whiteboards? How about power access for laptops and other devices? When it comes to tables, think about whether the tables will need to be moved and also whether participants will typically be sitting or standing during meetings. If you foresee there being stand-up meetings in the room, you might want to consider getting height-adjustable tables.

Core Meeting Room Technology and Equipment

Some key pieces of meeting room technology and equipment that you may want your meeting rooms to be outfitted with include whiteboards and markers, teleconferencing tools, and audiovisual presentation systems. Digital signs installed outside of meeting rooms where meeting organizers can book, cancel,  extend, or schedule meetings right on the spot help to prevent meeting scheduling conflicts.

Understand How People Collaborate

A meeting room booking system like Resource Central aggregates your meeting data and allows you to track and measure important meeting metrics so you can analyze them. This data gives you valuable insights into meeting room usage and behavior and helps you better understand your organization’s meeting room culture.

You’ll get a clear picture of which meeting rooms are used the most and to what extent. This helps to inform meeting room design decisions. For example, you might find based on meeting room usage data that your teams prefer open, non-traditional spaces for meetings, whereas management prefers classic meeting rooms equipped with a large table and projector. Without evaluating data about how your meeting rooms are used, it’s hard to make valuable improvements.

Meetings are a huge part of life in the office. Having effective, well-designed meeting room spaces that are equipped with the right tools can enhance the meeting experience for you and your attendees. To learn more about how you can improve the process of booking meeting rooms and gain access to valuable meeting room analytics, sign up for a free trial or free online demo of the meeting room booking system, Resource Central.