In this article, you will learn:
- How outdated meeting room technology is draining productivity and morale
- When setup friction erodes employee trust
- Why now is the right moment for a hardware refresh
- What to prioritize when evaluating new solutions
- How smarter tech investments pay off beyond the meeting room
Summer is a highly underused window in the IT calendar. Employees take vacations, office traffic is lighter and Summer Fridays are in action. It is the ideal time to audit, upgrade and reset before the post-summer return to office surge.
Companies have cycled through multiple iterations of hybrid and return-to-office policies since the pandemic. However, the average conference room and its meeting tech have largely stayed the same.
If you get the technology right now, in September, your team — or your clients — can walk back into meeting tech that makes their work lives easier.
The hidden productivity tax
Bad meeting tech impacts workers. The numbers are more significant than many organizations realize.
Owl Labs’ 2025 State of Hybrid Work Report found that nearly eight in 10 workers (77%) have lost time to technical difficulties, and the average employee spends over six minutes just launching a meeting. Additionally, 67% of workers have given up trying to get video technology working in a meeting room and simply moved on.
When employees give up on their tech, they have lost confidence in the spaces their organization has provided. That erodes trust, which makes hybrid collaboration feel like a burden rather than a benefit. These basic infrastructure problems are solvable, yet they continue to show up.
Here are some ways to mitigate that challenge.
1. Treat setup time as a measurable cost.
To make the best case for new hardware, IT leaders should quantify what poor tech already costs. If your organization has 200 hybrid workers each losing an average of six minutes per meeting, and on average, each person attends five online meetings per week, that is roughly 6,000 minutes or 100 hours of potential lost productivity every week, across the company.
Those hours are valuable, and the wasted time is worth flagging to leadership. IT teams should also document failure rates, support tickets related to meeting room hardware, and employee feedback. The business case for upgrading becomes clear when the cost is visible.
2. The best setup is no setup at all.
The single biggest improvement for hybrid workers is eliminating the setup ritual. When evaluating new solutions, look for:
- One-touch or zero-touch meeting launch that connects automatically when someone walks in or presses a single button
- Native calendar integration so the room already knows what meeting is next
- No dependency on personal devices, dongles or adapters to get started
- BYOD-friendly connectivity, such as plugging just one cable into your laptop and the meeting is ready to start
If employees have to think about how to start a meeting, the technology has already failed its first test.
3. Use certification as a baseline. Then consider real world implications.
Enterprise-grade certification programs, such as Microsoft Teams Certified solutions, signal that a device has been tested for reliability, security and integration in real business environments.
For IT teams, certified hardware means:
- Fewer support tickets and troubleshooting cycles
- Predictable behavior across software updates
- A defensible procurement decision when questions arise
From certification, IT leaders should evaluate how well a solution actually works for the people in the room as well as the people joining remotely.
4. Design for the remote participant, not just the room.
Most meeting room investments fall short when it comes to remote participation. A large display and a decent speakerphone checks boxes for people physically present. But if the remote participant is struggling to hear or watching a wide-angle shot of a whiteboard from 50 feet away, the meeting is already unequal. A better remote experience is not just a win for the employee dialing in; it’s a win for the entire meeting.
Frank Weishaupt
When assessing hardware, evaluate it from both seats. Ask:
- Can remote participants see faces clearly?
- Is audio pickup reliable from anywhere in the room?
- Does the camera track speakers automatically or does someone have to manage it?
Organizations should hold meeting tech to the standard of everyone in the meeting, regardless of where they’re sitting.
5. Plan for scale, not just the room in front of you.
It’s great if a solution works seamlessly in your largest conference room. But if you cannot deploy it in a huddle space or a smaller office, it is not a scalable or flexible solution.
As hybrid work has expanded, so, too, has the variety of spaces where meetings happen.
When evaluating hardware, you must:
- Confirm that solutions are available in flexible configurations or setups appropriate for different room sizes.
- Look for centralized management tools that monitor IT and update devices without visiting each room individually.
- Consider whether the vendor’s ecosystem can grow with the organization.
Meeting technology should create a consistent employee experience whether someone is in the flagship headquarters or a regional office with six people.
The larger argument for acting now
Roughly 85% of employees named good technology as the most important factor in their work lives. Organizations must invest in reliable, simple, well-designed meeting technology. That demonstrates to their employees that their time is worth protecting, and their experience in the industry matters.
In a competitive talent market, that signal has real weight. It shows that hardware can be an investment in retention, not just IT.
Frank Weishaupt is CEO of Owl Labs. The company was the first to build 360-degree videoconferencing solutions for hybrid organizations, including the award-winning Meeting Owl 5 Pro. Weishaupt was previously senior vice president of sales at CarGurus, playing an instrumental role in the company’s growth.
Featured image: Lumina Frame — stock.adobe.com
