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The Importance of Standards in Designing Meeting Spaces with Greg Jeffreys

Greg Jeffreys, co-owner at Visual Displays, managing consultant at Greg Jeffreys Consulting and former chair of the AVIXA standards committee, returns for a second conversation with Tom Arbuthnot. He makes the case for a holistic, standards-led approach to meeting room design, covering lighting, aco

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Who should listen: Microsoft 365 service owners, IT teams inheriting meeting room estates, and AV/UC consultants and integrators who want a structured, standards-based approach to room design beyond device selection.

Guest: Greg Jeffreys — Co-owner, Visual Displays; Managing Consultant, Greg Jeffreys Consulting; former chair of the AVIXA Standards Committee, Visual Displays / Greg Jeffreys Consulting

Many thanks to Jabra, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

Technology cannot compensate for a badly designed space — poor lighting and acoustics leave the kit fighting an uphill battle. Get the room right and you often need to spend less on the technology. ▶ 1:34
The pandemic scramble to make spaces hybrid did an admirable job but set the bar low for what counts as 'good enough', and that low bar has persisted as rooms moved from AV specialists to IT-led deployments. ▶ 3:05
Microsoft research quoted in the episode says only around 5% of meeting rooms are equipped — which points to huge demand but also to a volume, commodity-driven market. ▶ 3:35
If an enterprise isn't working to an AVIXA, WELL or CIty standard, ask what standard it is using — the usual answer is silence. Standards should be applied critically and simply, not treated as tablets of stone. ▶ 4:37
The consultancy method is 'disaggregation' plus marginal gains: break the room into lighting, acoustics, audio, display and furniture, then look for a small but significant improvement in each. It works equally for new builds, upgrades and troubleshooting. ▶ 6:40
Talk to the actual users, not just the brief writers, and distinguish what people say they want from what they need — sometimes the right answer is a whiteboard, a flip chart and a webcam rather than an expensive interactive display. ▶ 8:42
Stop classifying rooms as small, medium or large — size is an attribute, not a classification. Classify by workflow and function: presenting, collaborating or teaching. Also respect microphone pickup range; pushing a bar past its stated metres doesn't kill audio, it just degrades it. ▶ 10:45
On multi-camera and spatial audio, expect a 'score draw' at first — added complexity, latency and lag, plus side-of-face and ear views. Diverging vendor approaches (Logitech, Neat, Crestron Automate VX, Cisco) will differentiate on how feeds are switched and processed, not just megapixels. ▶ 14:19
Define standards as performance standards: reverse-engineer from the use case to measurable, repeatable metrics, and be clear that 'standards' means both quality level and repeatability/standardisation. ▶ 16:56