Here’s a scenario that plays out in offices across Australia multiple times a day: someone books a meeting room for a hybrid meeting. Three people are in the room, five are on video. The room’s camera shows the whiteboard but not the people. The microphone picks up the person closest to it but not the person across the table. Remote participants can’t read the whiteboard. The in-room people forget to share their screens. Someone dials in late and gets no audio for two minutes.

We’ve been doing hybrid work for years now, and the meeting room experience is still terrible for remote participants. The technology exists to fix this. But most offices haven’t invested in it, don’t know what to invest in, or bought the wrong things.

The Room Utilisation Paradox

Most offices that switched to hybrid work have a meeting room utilisation problem that goes in two directions simultaneously.

Rooms are over-booked on popular days (Tuesday-Thursday) and ghost-town empty on Mondays and Fridays. People book rooms “just in case” and don’t cancel when plans change. Three-person meetings occupy eight-person rooms. The booking system shows rooms as unavailable when they’re physically empty because someone forgot to release a reservation.

Meanwhile, some rooms go unused because they’re known to have bad AV equipment, poor video call quality, or uncomfortable chairs. People avoid these rooms and compete for the good ones, creating artificial scarcity.

The result is that most organisations have enough physical meeting space but terrible allocation of that space. Solving this is more of a process and culture problem than a technology one, though technology can help.

What Remote Participants Actually Experience

If you’ve only been the in-room person in hybrid meetings, you might not realise how bad the remote experience usually is. I spent a week joining all my meetings remotely (even though I was in the office) to understand what our remote colleagues deal with. It was eye-opening.

Audio is the biggest issue. Most meeting rooms have a single conference microphone in the centre of the table. People near it are fine. People at the ends of the table are muffled or inaudible. When two people talk simultaneously, the microphone can’t separate them. Background noise from the hallway is picked up because someone left the door open.

Video is the second biggest issue. Most rooms have a wide-angle camera at one end. It shows the whole room, which means individual faces are tiny on a laptop screen. You can’t tell who’s speaking. If someone stands to use the whiteboard, the camera doesn’t follow them. Some rooms have ancient 720p cameras that produce a blurry, washed-out image.

The “room as one participant” problem. On video call platforms, the room appears as a single tile. Five people crammed into one small video tile while each remote participant gets their own. This creates an implicit hierarchy where remote people feel like second-class participants.

What Good Hybrid Meeting Rooms Look Like

The technology to solve these problems exists. It’s not cheap, but it’s not outrageously expensive either.

Intelligent cameras. Devices from manufacturers like Poly, Jabra, and Neat have AI-powered cameras that automatically track speakers, zoom in on active participants, and can show multiple in-room people as individual video tiles. This eliminates the “one tiny room tile” problem. The Neat Bar Pro is one of the better options we’ve tested.

Multiple microphones. Ceiling-mounted microphone arrays (like the Shure MXA920) pick up audio evenly across the room, regardless of seating position. They’re significantly better than a single tabletop puck mic. More expensive, but the audio quality difference is dramatic.

Digital whiteboarding. If your team uses physical whiteboards, a camera pointed at the whiteboard (like the Huddly Canvas) can share the whiteboard content digitally with remote participants. Better yet, switch to digital whiteboard tools that everyone — in-room and remote — can interact with equally.

Room scheduling displays. A tablet mounted outside each room showing current booking status, with one-touch release for unused bookings, helps with the ghost booking problem. People are more likely to release a room when the technology makes it easy.

The Real Problem Is Budget Priority

Most organisations I talk to know their meeting rooms aren’t great for hybrid work. The issue is that meeting room AV upgrades compete with every other IT budget priority, and they often lose.

A proper hybrid meeting room setup costs $5,000-$15,000 per room depending on room size and equipment quality. For an office with 10 meeting rooms, that’s a significant investment. Spread over several years of use, the per-meeting cost is minimal, but the upfront number triggers approval processes and procurement delays.

Meanwhile, employees work around the problems — huddling near microphones, apologising for audio quality, sharing photos of whiteboards in chat. The workarounds are individually small but collectively they waste enormous amounts of time and create frustration.

Cultural Fixes That Cost Nothing

Some of the worst hybrid meeting problems are behavioural, not technical.

Start meetings with an audio check. “Can everyone hear clearly?” takes five seconds and catches problems before they derail the meeting.

Default to screen sharing, not physical materials. If a document is being discussed, share it on screen rather than printing copies for the room and leaving remote people to find their own copy.

Use the chat for questions. Remote participants are at a natural disadvantage for jumping into conversations. Designating the chat as a question channel gives them an equal opportunity to contribute.

End meetings on time to allow room transitions. Back-to-back bookings without buffer time mean the first five minutes of every meeting are lost to “sorry, the last meeting ran over.”

Cancel rooms you’re not using. Make it a team norm, not just a suggestion.

The Underrated Option: Fewer Meetings

Sometimes the best solution to the meeting room problem is having fewer meetings. If a meeting could be an email, a Loom video, or a shared document with comments, skip the meeting entirely. This frees up rooms for meetings that genuinely need real-time interaction.

The meetings that benefit most from being in-person or hybrid are brainstorming sessions, difficult conversations, team building, and complex problem-solving. Status updates, information sharing, and routine check-ins can almost always be asynchronous.

Reducing meeting count by even 20% would solve most organisations’ room availability problems overnight.

Worth Fixing

Hybrid work isn’t going away. The companies that invest in making it work well — proper AV equipment, sensible booking processes, and cultural norms that treat remote participants as equals — will have a meaningful advantage in recruiting and retaining people who value flexibility.

The companies that keep making remote participants squint at a blurry wide-angle camera while straining to hear muffled audio will keep losing good people to organisations that take this stuff seriously.

It’s not a glamorous problem. But it’s one that affects every meeting, every day, for everyone who works remotely even part of the time. That makes it worth solving properly.