Huddle Rooms 101 – The Ultimate Guide to Small Meeting Spaces

Your guide to Huddle Rooms

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Huddle Room 101
Meeting Rooms and Devices

Published: January 9, 2019

Rebekah Carter - Writer

Rebekah Carter

Meetings are still some of the most important interactions in a business environment.

Although unproductive meetings can leave your employees lamenting every trip to your conference rooms, well-structured interactions can support better productivity, enhanced staff satisfaction, and better business results.

In a world where agility and focus are key, huddle rooms are beginning to replace the old-fashioned board room environment. Huddle rooms are small meeting areas, typically with enough space for up to 6 participants. These rooms come with all of the technology you’d expect in a standard meeting room, including display monitors, video cameras, and even conference phones.

What are Huddle Rooms and How do They Work?

Huddle rooms are spaces designed to support quick, ad-hoc meetings between in office-employees and clients, shareholders, or remote workers. Huddle rooms are becoming increasingly popular in modern open-plan offices, where teams need a private space to host conversations and brainstorming sessions.

While huddle rooms may be small, they’re packed with potential. Before the huddle room, most companies spent thousands creating a single, extravagant conference space equipped with all the technology they needed for effective communications. Huddle rooms offer a more cost-effective and intimate environment ideal for the fast-paced millennial worker.

Named after the standard sports “huddle” these small conference rooms provide an excellent space for digitally-enhanced meetings. The rooms often feature technology like:

  • Web cameras
  • Monitors
  • A small table
  • Conference phones
  • Interactive whiteboards

What Are the Benefits of a Huddle Room?

Huddle rooms are much smaller than the standard conference room, but they can be highly effective in the right business environment. For instance, Huddle rooms are particularly popular among the millennial workforce, who prefer a more informal approach to standard company processes like conferences and meetings. Huddle rooms also offer:

  • A useful way to engage with remote workers: With huddle rooms, teams can reach out to remote workers on a regular basis, without having to book an entire conference room. Huddle rooms are ideal for quick chat and collaboration sessions
  • Focused meetings: Huddle rooms are designed for quick, intimate gatherings. The fact that there’s only room for a small number of attendees means that only the people who need to be in a huddle are invited. This reduces the risk of unnecessary or unproductive meetings
  • Low-cost, low-effort installations: Finding the space and money required for a conference room can be difficult – especially for smaller companies. Huddle rooms, on the other hand, can be set up in very little time, with portable conference phones, cameras, and a software solution. You can even transport your huddle room from one room to another depending on your needs that day
  • Flexibility: When you’re not using a huddle room, other members of your team can access it for a variety of reasons. For instance, your huddle room could act as a hot-desking environment for remote workers visiting the office, or a meeting space for a client conversation

Trends in Huddle Rooms

Huddle Rooms are an increasingly popular trend in the video conferencing market, designed to offer a more flexible approach to multi-media communications. Huddle rooms are particularly attractive to younger employees who want a more laid-back collaborative environment to work in. These small spaces are ideal for taking care of business in a cost-effective way, whether you need to record a webinar or make a sales presentation. As the demand for huddle rooms increases, we’re beginning to see trends like:

  • Intelligent room scheduling services: AI-infused room scheduling solutions help to ensure that your company can make the most out of its huddle room environments. Room scheduling services can even integrate with your unified communication tools to show when people are busy in a meeting on your “presence” software
  • Virtual assistants: Virtual assistants are increasingly making their way into the meeting room environment. With a voice-enabled assistant, you can simply ask your system to schedule your next meeting or transcribe a meeting as it happens for you
  • Innovative endpoints: We’ve already begun to experiment with things like interactive whiteboards in the huddle room to improve collaboration. However, in the years to come, we could also start to see things like mixed reality, augmented reality and virtual reality transforming the way that coworkers connect
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