The Importance of Standards & Room Design with Microsoft Teams Rooms with Greg Jeffreys

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Who should listen: Microsoft 365 service owners, AV and UC consultants, and workplace or facilities teams planning Microsoft Teams Rooms deployments who want to get room design, acoustics and lighting right before selecting hardware.

Guest: Greg Jeffreys — Consultant, co-owner and standards author (AVIXA), Visual Displays

Greg Jeffreys is a specialist AV consultant, co-owner of projected display manufacturer Visual Displays and a long-standing contributor to AVIXA's standards leadership, having led or co-written several of the standards used in meeting room design. He talks to Tom Arbuthnot about why room design and standards are lagging behind Microsoft Teams Rooms hardware innovation, and how to fix rooms before choosing kit.

Many thanks to Crestron, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

• Hardware innovation from the Teams Rooms vendors is racing ahead, but room design practice and the standards applied to it are lagging — rooms that look well equipped on paper will increasingly expose their shortcomings as the ecosystem develops. ▶ 3:00
• Much of what's in place today is pandemic-era improvisation. The industry deserves credit for making hybrid spaces work quickly, but those habits and the lack of thought about room layout are now showing up as real problems. ▶ 3:30
• Organisational silos are a structural cause of bad rooms: facilities and building management sit apart from AV and IT, producing outcomes such as expensive lighting being overdriven and washing out the displays. ▶ 4:00
• Treat AV and IT as already converged rather than as separate disciplines — Tom cites projects where room systems were procured that were simply incompatible with the UC platform because the two teams never spoke. ▶ 5:03
• Use a disaggregation and marginal gains method: break the room into audio, display, lighting, acoustics, room finishes and video, and ask what a 5–10% improvement looks like for each element. Standards exist for all of them but must be applied critically. ▶ 6:06
• Audio is the priority and the most neglected element. Video dropping out on a call is survivable; audio failing is not — and teams routinely select room systems without ever testing how the space sounds and looks at the far end. ▶ 6:36
• Better rooms are not necessarily more expensive rooms: inexpensive equipment in a properly designed space outperforms expensive kit undermined by poor lighting or acoustics, and getting the basics right can cut both capital and running costs. ▶ 9:43
• Technology must enter at RIBA stage one rather than after handover — AV is typically brought in late, like a tradesman told to stick a TV on the wall. Frameworks such as the WELL building standard, which award points for getting AV right, get architects and technologists round the same table. ▶ 13:22
• The commercial argument for technology-enabled spaces is occupancy and rent: with fewer people in the office and leases under review, buildings that have thought through the meeting experience are the ones that will attract the next tenant. ▶ 15:27

Insights summarised by AI from the episode transcript, reviewed by the Empowering.Cloud team.

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