A good meeting room AV standard for an office fit-out means every room, from a two-person huddle space to the main boardroom, supports video calls reliably and works the same way for staff wherever they sit. Rather than specifying each room individually, set a small number of tiers based on room size and purpose, apply the same control logic and camera/microphone approach across all of them, and build in enough flexibility that rooms can be repurposed as headcount and meeting patterns change.
Why the standard has changed
Meeting room AV specs written five or ten years ago assumed most meetings happened in person, with video conferencing reserved for the boardroom or a dedicated “video suite”. That assumption no longer holds. Hybrid meetings — some people in the room, some joining remotely — are now the default format for most business meetings, not an exception that gets special treatment. That shifts what “meeting room AV” needs to mean in a fit-out brief.
The practical consequence is that video conferencing capability can no longer sit at the boardroom-only end of the spec. If only one room has a camera and decent microphones, every other room becomes a bottleneck the moment someone outside the building needs to join. A fit-out that gets this right treats camera, microphone and screen coverage as a baseline requirement across most bookable spaces, scaled to room size, rather than a premium feature bolted onto one or two rooms.
Why consistency matters more than any single room
It’s tempting to spec each room on its own merits — a bit more budget here, a different platform there, a one-off installation because the room has an odd shape. In practice this creates ongoing problems. Staff who have to relearn how to start a call in every room they book will avoid the ones they’re less familiar with, or waste the first five minutes of a meeting troubleshooting. IT and facilities teams end up supporting a patchwork of control systems, camera brands and software versions, multiplying the training and maintenance burden for no real benefit.
A consistent standard solves both problems. If the “join a call” experience is the same button, the same layout, the same platform logic in every room — huddle space or boardroom — staff don’t need reminding how it works each time, and support becomes one fault-finding process and one maintenance relationship instead of several. It’s worth deciding on a platform approach — Microsoft Teams Rooms, Zoom Rooms, Google Meet hardware, or a BYOD room that works with whatever the visitor is running — early in the fit-out, rather than letting each room’s contractor make that call independently. We’ve covered the practical differences between the main platforms in /teams-rooms-vs-zoom-rooms/, worth reading before the standard is locked in.
Consistency doesn’t mean identical equipment in every room — a huddle room doesn’t need a boardroom’s speaker array. It means the same underlying approach: a compatible brand family, the same control interface pattern, the same cabling standard, so moving between rooms doesn’t mean moving between different technologies.
Tiering rooms by size and use case
Rather than writing a single spec that fits every room, it’s more useful to think in tiers, because a two-person huddle room, a standard meeting room and a twelve-person boardroom have genuinely different requirements, not just “more of the same equipment”.
A small huddle or focus room (one to three people, one screen) mainly needs close-range audio and a camera angle that works when someone is sitting a metre from the screen. Equipment here can be compact and relatively low cost, but it still needs to run the same platform and control logic as everywhere else.
A standard meeting room (four to eight people, a table, one or two screens) is where most of the coverage decision gets made. Microphone pickup across the table, a camera wide enough to frame everyone, and a correctly sized screen all matter more here, because the room is big enough that a single built-in laptop camera and microphone genuinely aren’t adequate.
A boardroom or large meeting room (eight to fourteen-plus people, often more formal) usually needs distributed or ceiling microphone coverage rather than a single unit, camera framing that can track or switch between speakers, and more careful acoustic treatment — poor audio in a large room is one of the biggest causes of remote participants disengaging from a call. Dual screens and a more capable control system tend to earn their place here too.
Beyond that sits the large collaboration or all-hands space, closer to a presentation or town-hall setup than a meeting room, with its own requirements for reinforced audio and larger-format display that fall outside a standard meeting room spec. The point of tiering isn’t to name exact products for each size band; it’s to make sure the fit-out brief asks the right question for each room — what size is it, what’s it used for, which tier does it belong to — before any equipment gets chosen. We go into the sequencing and first-fix detail this raises in /av-office-refurbishment-what-to-specify-first-fix/, useful reading alongside this at the early stages of a fit-out programme.
Specify for change, not just for today
Office layouts and meeting patterns rarely stay fixed for the life of a fit-out. Teams grow or shrink, a room booked mainly for four-person meetings gets used for six-person interviews, a huddle space gets absorbed into a bigger area during a later refresh. Specifying AV tightly around today’s headcount and layout tends to leave a fit-out looking undersized within a couple of years.
Building in headroom costs relatively little at the design stage compared with retrofitting a room later. That means containment and cabling sized for more capability than day-one equipment needs, power and data points positioned to allow a screen or camera to move if the room is reconfigured, and mounting hardware chosen so screens and cameras can be repositioned rather than replaced. It also means picking a platform with a credible upgrade path, so adding capability in a few years’ time is a hardware swap rather than a full re-spec. This is an extension of the consistency argument above: a standard that’s consistent across rooms is also easier to extend, since a new or refurbished room can simply adopt it rather than needing its own bespoke design process.
Frequently asked questions
Do all meeting rooms need video conferencing equipment, or just the boardroom?
In most modern offices, yes — most bookable meeting rooms should support video calls, not just the boardroom. Hybrid meetings are now the standard format for everyday business, so a room without camera and microphone coverage becomes a room staff avoid booking when a remote participant is involved. Equipment can and should scale down for smaller rooms, but the capability itself shouldn’t be limited to one or two flagship spaces.
Should every room use the same video conferencing platform?
Ideally yes, or at least a consistent, compatible approach across the estate. Running the same platform logic — Microsoft Teams Rooms, Zoom Rooms, Google Meet hardware or a BYOD standard — in every room means staff don’t have to relearn the join process each time, and IT support isn’t managing several different systems in parallel.
How much should we oversize AV provision for future headcount changes?
There’s no fixed rule, but it’s usually worth designing the infrastructure — cabling, containment, power, mounting positions — with more capacity than day-one equipment needs, even if the initial equipment spec matches current headcount. That way, a room can be upgraded later with a hardware change rather than a full rewire, which is considerably more disruptive once the office is occupied.
If you’re putting together a fit-out brief and want the meeting room AV standard set correctly from the outset, our /sectors/office-refurbishment/ page covers how we work with contractors and design teams on office refurbishment projects, and our /solutions/meeting-room-av/ page goes into more detail on the meeting room AV solutions themselves. To talk through a specific project, get in touch via /contact/?enquiry=Office+Refurbishment+%E2%80%93+AV+Fit-Out.
