Hybrid work has given employees a reference point they did not have before. Three days a week at home means three days using a setup they chose themselves: a camera that frames them properly, a microphone that picks up their voice cleanly, a screen layout that works for how they actually operate. Then they come into the office and sit in a meeting room with a cable they cannot find, a touch panel that takes thirty seconds to wake up, and audio that makes them sound like they are calling from a stairwell.
Neil Fluester, Senior Product Marketing at Logitech for Business, says that gap has become one of the main things his customers are trying to address:
"Organisations now need to earn the commute. Employees have great setups at home, mirrorless cameras, quality audio, dual screens. For them to come in, they need an experience that's as good as or better. The worst thing you can do is get everyone back in the office and have them sitting on Teams calls on a built-in laptop camera."
When the in-room experience falls short, remote participants feel it too. They get the muffled audio, or the moment where nobody realises the camera has not picked up the person who just walked in. A meeting room that works poorly for the people inside it tends to work even worse for the people dialling in.
Overcoming The Fragmented Estate Problem
Many of the room estates IT directors are managing today were built between 2021 and 2023, when organisations were equipping offices at pace and procuring from whoever had stock. The result is meeting rooms that behave differently from floor to floor, require different steps to start a call, and generate support tickets that are difficult to diagnose because nobody tested the full setup before it went live. The inconsistency compounds over time as staff turn over and institutional knowledge about which room does what disappears with it.
Microsoft Teams certification has become the most common response to this. A certified deployment means devices appear in the Teams admin centre, receive updates centrally, and can be managed across an estate from a single place. Gauthier Renard, Group Product Manager for Barco ClickShare, highlights the value of certification:
"Certified for Teams means you are in the ecosystem. Your devices show up in the pro management portal, they receive updates, they can be managed. Every party involved, Barco, Logitech, Microsoft, tests every possible change to make sure nothing gets broken. The investment you have made is kept safe for the duration of the lifetime of your room."
There is a common assumption that certified MTR hardware means locked-down rooms with limited flexibility. Renard says that concern reflects an earlier generation of deployments rather than what certified solutions look like now, and that vendors are able to build meaningfully on top of the certification baseline rather than being constrained by it.
