4 Ways You Can Make Meeting Rooms More Equitable for Hybrid Work

Meeting equity refers to each worker having an equal ability to speak, share and ideate in a meeting, no matter where they work from. Subpar equity in meetings can bring down productivity and the quality of the hybrid work experience.

The meeting room experience is central to maintaining meeting equity as it connects workers across locations. When workers aren’t able to fully engage in meetings, they spend more time catching up, contribute less and feel dissatisfied.

At the same time, hybrid workers who switch between office and home may find collaboration more difficult to manage, which can have an impact on their overall performance.

• Uneven meeting experiences: Poor audio, limited camera coverage and lack of visibility often disadvantage remote participants, reducing their engagement and contribution.
• Fragmented technology environments: Inconsistent tools, room setups and platforms across offices create friction and delays, impacting meeting flow and user adoption.
• Collaboration imbalance: In-room participants may tend to dominate discussions, while remote employees face barriers in participating in whiteboarding, side conversations and decision-making.

These challenges start from the meeting room but extend to the entire hybrid workforce, limiting equal participation. To help ensure meeting equity, organizations need to rethink how their meeting rooms manage connectivity, content display and remote access.

To build meeting rooms that meet modern collaboration needs while offering frictionless connectivity, organizations should focus on the following four technology pillars.

While dedicated meeting rooms are great for discussions, sometimes connecting to the videoconferencing equipment itself becomes a barrier to productivity.

Legacy meeting rooms usually have wired connections for everything from laptops to speakers and screens. Think of those thick HDMI ports that are missing from more modern laptops.

If employees don’t have the cables or connectors handy, they may spend the start of the meeting just searching for the right hardware.

And if there are multiple meeting rooms, each room would have its own setup, which can cause delays in meeting start times. With all the cables and connections to sort out, meetings that should be quick and productive get slowed down by avoidable technical hurdles.

Our partners at Barco offer a simple way to connect meeting devices quickly with their ClickShare Conference solution. It enables users to instantly start a wireless meeting by connecting their laptop to meeting room AV systems including cameras, microphones and displays without cables or complicated setup. 

It features a USB dongle for employee laptops that wirelessly connects to a ClickShare base unit. This way, the base unit manages screens and audio equipment while employees can freely use the meeting room space. 

Meeting attendees can use their preferred conferencing platform such as Teams, Zoom, etc., while sharing content with others over the air. ClickShare's interoperable and guest-friendly design helps create a unified experience across meeting spaces.

• Quicker meeting setup: Eliminates setup delays and helps start a meeting in about seven seconds so users can focus on collaboration
• Improved meeting equity: High-quality room AV ensures remote participants are clearly seen and heard
• Work from any room: Users can walk in, connect and start with a very low learning curve, without IT support
• Greater flexibility and confidence: Supports scheduled, ad hoc and hybrid meetings with a consistent experience

Meeting room display screens ensure everyone can see the shared content but they don’t always help attendees actively participate.

Most screens act passively, where participants can’t easily interact, annotate or co-create in real time. More hands-on ways of collaboration such as whiteboards, hand-held markers and note-taking screens require native hardware support.

This leads to one-way communication where attendees can listen to the speaker but can’t engage. Therefore, virtual meetings and presentations remain mostly static with limited in-depth collaboration.

Our partners at Sharp can help solve the problem with their interactive displays, enabled with advanced touch screen features that transform meetings into hands-on, collaborative experiences.

These displays readily integrate with meeting platforms and let users write, draw or annotate directly on the screen. Participants can share and present content wirelessly while collaborating across in-room and remote participants in real time.

The displays also feature an easy-to-set-up design that allows attendees to get started without delays.

• Higher engagement: Interactive tools encourage participation from both in-room and remote attendees
• Improved collaboration and creativity: Teams can brainstorm, annotate and build ideas together in real time
• Better alignment across locations: Shared visual context ensures everyone stays on the same page
• Simplified workflows: Reduces the need for multiple tools by consolidating presentation, annotation and collaboration in one interface

Another common source of friction in modern meeting rooms is the disconnect between personal devices and room technology. When attendees walk into a meeting room, they may juggle power, displays, networking and peripherals separately instead of having a single connection point.

The same goes for the device they’re presenting or hosting the meeting from. What works at a personal workstation may not translate easily in a meeting room. Employees don’t want to deal with too many cables in the meeting room and require a quick setup approach that helps host meetings effortlessly.

The bottom line is that organizations need to standardize connectivity across desks and meeting rooms to deliver a consistent meeting room experience.

Our partners at Targus have devised a practical solution to avoid messy cables with their universal docking stations. These stations act as connection hubs that allow users to connect their laptop to multiple peripherals such as displays, audio, network and accessories using a single cable.

The docking stations support a wide range of laptop brands and operating systems while extending content to multiple displays in meeting rooms. In-room attendees can gain access to any equipment they need in the room while also getting power supplied from the dock.

For hybrid employees, this is useful in two main ways. They can enjoy a plug-and-play experience whenever they work from the office while easily connecting their devices to their work-from-home setups.

• Faster setup: Start or join meetings by simply connecting the laptop without the need for adapters or troubleshooting
• Consistent experience across spaces: The same connection method at the desk and in meeting rooms builds confidence and ease of use
• Enhanced productivity: Multidisplay support and instant access to peripherals improve workflow efficiency
• Greater mobility: Employees can move between meeting rooms, home setups and personal office desks without reconfiguring their devices

Each meeting room is built differently, depending upon the purpose. While some rooms can fit a small team, others are specifically designed to accommodate larger groups.

This means each room needs a custom-fit screen, which can be challenging with hard-panel screens. Small screens in large rooms make it difficult for in-room participants to read content or follow discussions, while oversized displays in small rooms limit flexibility and comfort.

For meetings with multiple remote presenters, fitting everything onto one screen can lead to a cluttered experience for attendees. Which is why, to maintain meeting equity, meeting rooms need right-sized displays.

Our partners at Epson offer corporate and business projectors that come with advanced display solutions designed to deliver large, bright and flexible visuals for meeting rooms of varying sizes.

The projectors help create large-scale displays (often exceeding 100–300 inches) for clear visibility across the room. Attendees get a high-brightness view with support for ultrawide and flexible aspect ratios that can easily fit several presenters at once.

By projecting onto walls or screens of varying sizes, Epson enables organizations to right-size their visual experience for any meeting space.

• Clear visibility for everyone: Large, immersive displays ensure both in-room and remote participants can easily follow content
• Improved meeting equity: Ultrawide formats give remote participants a stronger, more visible presence in the room
• More engaging collaboration: Ability to display multiple content streams (presentations, video calls, notes) enhances interaction
• Greater flexibility: One solution can adapt to different room sizes and meeting needs without compromise

Meeting rooms that include everyone, both in the room and virtually, need to consider several design and technology decisions. CDW Canada helps organizations transform meeting rooms by starting with a strategic, user-first approach.

At CDW, we assess how employees collaborate across hybrid environments, identify gaps in current setups and design solutions aligned to real business needs. We also bring together leading technologies from our partners, integrating videoconferencing platforms, displays and collaboration tools into a single, cohesive experience.

With design and deployment services, CDW’s teams of architects and engineers ensure meeting rooms are consistent, high-performing and easy to use across locations.

• Solution design: Architect meeting spaces optimized for usability, performance and meeting equity
• Implementation: Deploy and configure integrated solutions with certified experts
• User experience design: Standardize interfaces and workflows for consistency across rooms
• Ongoing management: Support, monitor and optimize environments to ensure long-term success