Four Most Common Conference Room Issues and How Your AV Integrator Can Help

The Four Most Common Conference Room Issues (and how your AV integrator can help)

Video conferencing has come a long way in the last couple decades, to the point where most conferencing-related frustrations have been eliminated through innovation. Gone are the days where muddy images, stuttering frame rates and complicated software made conferencing a chore. Compared to 20 years ago, video conferencing is pleasant and simple.Like with any technology, though, there is still room for improvement. While most of the technical issues have been ironed out, some organizations have difficulty fully integrating video conferencing into their processes, and audio is a hurdle for many spaces.Here, we’ll go over some of the most common conference room issues and how an AV integrator can help your organization overcome them.

Our Conference Rooms Aren’t Getting Enough Use

Some video conferencing issues aren’t related to the technology, but the space dedicated to the technology. It’s common, for example, for businesses to add a lot of conference rooms quickly, only to find that many of those rooms are underutilized. Finding the right balance between too few and too many conference rooms is tough. Every empty conference room is wasted space, but too few conference rooms and your teams won’t collaborate as well as they could.If your video conferencing spaces aren’t picking up enough interest, then the problem may be how the conference rooms are organized. Instead of sticking the same conference table in every conferencing space, change up the furniture, layout and design of your meeting rooms. A sofa and a couple of lounge chairs, for instance, will encourage small teams to meet informally.An AV integrator can help organizations make big changes to their video conferencing rooms if they aren’t justifying their investment. For example, if your large conferencing spaces are only hosting small meetings, then turning that space into a dedicated collaboration room or splitting it up into multiple huddle rooms could improve your technology adoption rates.

We Don’t Have Enough Conference Rooms For All Of Our Meetings

This is the opposite problem - too many meetings and not enough video conferencing rooms to accommodate them all.One solution is to expand your video conferencing footprint, adding more conferencing spaces to make up the difference. This is a significant investment, but if your organization is tight on both space and resources, AV-as-a-Service (AVaaS) can help your business acquire needed video conferencing technology without making a major capital investment. Instead, organizations pay for their AV solutions monthly, using an OpEx approach. This provides budgeting certainty and valuable AV assets at once.Another option is to maintain tighter control over how your conferencing spaces are utilized. If your teams are all trying to meet at the same time, your peak usage times may overwhelm your conferencing spaces while leaving them empty the rest of the day. That’s not a space problem, but a scheduling problem.Room scheduling solutions are a proven way to eliminate meeting space bottlenecks and can be used in tandem with other AV solutions. With room scheduling, professional teams must reserve a room in advance, so there’s no overlap in usage. Room scheduling works best when tied to a shared calendar, so users can see what rooms and time slots are available before reserving a room.The only potential challenge with room scheduling is ensuring people don’t reserve rooms that they don’t end up using. This is frustrating for other teams, but it can be mitigated with minimal effort. For example, if a team doesn’t show up to a reserved room, an e-mail can be automatically sent out to the meeting’s organizer alerting them to the missed reservation.

It’s Difficult For Everyone To Hear Each Other During Meetings

On the technical side, video conferencing solutions run with minimal disruption. When there is an issue, though, it’s frequently the audio that’s causing the problem.There are a few reasons why poor audio could be plaguing your video conference rooms. A lot of the time, it’s the room’s acoustics interfering with how sound travels through the space. Poor acoustics are normally the result of sound waves bouncing off of hard surfaces in the room. AV integrators have technology they can use to model a room’s acoustics and make meaningful improvements. Adding soft, padded surfaces and furniture can help, as well as baffles or soundproof materials. Poor audio may also be an audio hardware problem. If there aren’t enough microphones in the room, or if the microphones aren’t positioned close enough to the meeting’s participants, then your room may not be capturing enough audio. If output volume is too low, then an AV integrator can add speakers or reposition existing speakers for better audio coverage.

Connecting To The Conferencing Room Is A Real Pain

Once a conference is underway, there’s usually little to worry about. It’s the getting started part that’s tough for many, and it often comes down to connectivity. Some organizations prefer to toss out the cables altogether and invest in wireless connectivity. Solutions like wireless presentation systems can support this approach. However, it’s still a good idea to have wired connectivity options when network resources are scarce .There are also challenges with wired connectors, of course. One is ensuring you have enough connectors for your conference spaces. Another is cable management. Businesses can solve both problems at once by routing their cables through the table. There are conference room tables built for this purpose, and it ensures everyone has the physical connectors they need without dragging a cable across the room.

AV Integrators Can Troubleshoot And Resolve Your Conference Room Issues

Conference room issues aren’t common, but they’re frustrating when they do occur. If your organization is having trouble getting optimal value out of its conference rooms and if frustration is mounting, then a certified AV integrator can help. Experienced AV integrators spend a lot of time designing, installing and supporting conference room solutions, and they can spot and eliminate conference room issues before they become more than just issues.