Focus rooms vs. huddle rooms: Optimizing collaboration spaces

Optimizing focus rooms

Focus rooms are typically small spaces designed for one person, although some focus rooms may provide sufficient space for more than one person. Focus rooms are often referred to as phone booths, but phone booths are typically used only when employees need to participate in video calls without distraction or disturbing others. Focus rooms, on the other hand, are often used for longer periods of time when individuals need to isolate themselves from coworkers to avoid distractions.

Key requirements for focus rooms include the following:

• High-quality audio and video to support personal video conferencing.
• The ability to block out background noise and distractions.
• Customizability for lighting, desktop positioning and other ergonomics as necessary.

Focus rooms used for individual ideation may also benefit from the provisioning of additional capabilities for content sharing and ideation, such as touch screens and whiteboards.

Optimizing huddle rooms

Huddle rooms are typically designed for small teams to meet and collaborate. They may be dedicated meeting rooms or open spaces within an office. Key requirements for huddle rooms include the following:

• Video conferencing capabilities to support meetings with remote participants.
• Easy content sharing without needing to launch a meeting and manage AV settings.
• Support for ideation with touch screens and whiteboards.

Depending on the design of the huddle room, a front-of-room camera may be sufficient to capture in-room participants. For huddle rooms with round tables, a center-of-table camera can capture a frontal view of each person in the room.

Huddle areas in open spaces may require background noise cancellation technology that creates audio and video zones to ensure remote participants only see and hear those in the defined huddle space.

Common requirements for focus and huddle rooms

Despite their differences, focus and huddle rooms have common requirements to ensure success. These include:

• Space reservation software. Metrigy finds growing adoption for reservation software that enables employees to easily reserve the right spaces for their collaboration needs. Organizations can choose between standalone offerings from vendors, such as Appspace, Calven and Robin, or reservation capabilities available from their unified communications vendors, including Cisco, Microsoft and Zoom. The apps can also integrate with digital signage to direct people to the correct spaces, as well as integrate with wall-mounted devices to display availability and support ad hoc room reservations.

• Space usage analytics. Organizations typically require insight into room usage trends, such as usage frequency and how employees are using the spaces, to adjust floor plans as necessary. Analytics capabilities may also identify the number of people in the room, room air quality and room reservation no-shows. Coupled with space reservation software, organizations could enable cancelling reservations to make rooms available for others.

Achieving collaboration space success

Successfully implementing focus and huddle rooms requires understanding employee collaboration needs and organizational goals, provisioning the right room environment, as well as proactively managing room spaces to obtain the necessary information to refine floor layout plans.

Irwin Lazar is president and principal analyst at Metrigy, where he leads coverage on the digital workplace. His research focus includes unified communications, VoIP, video conferencing and team collaboration.