Our meeting rooms aren't being used, what can I do?

Under-utilised meeting rooms are rarely an AV problem on their own; the cause is usually a mix of user-experience friction, wrong room sizing for hybrid demand, weak booking enforcement and lingering reputation damage from past unreliability. Treating it as "buy more kit" almost never fixes it. Treating it as five separate diagnostics, each with its own quick win, usually does.

The five most common causes, in the order they typically show up:

• UX friction in the room. One-touch join not actually one-touch, control panel screen with too many options, BYOD users hunting for the right cable. People hold meetings at their desk because the room is harder. Quick win: simplify the touch panel layout to "join", "share content" and "end", standardise the cable presentation, fix any room where one-touch join is broken.
• Wrong room sizing for hybrid demand. Estates designed pre-2020 typically have too many 8+ person rooms and not enough 2 to 4 person huddles or phone booths. Hybrid teams of 3 dialling in 2 remote colleagues don't want the boardroom. Quick win: pull the booking data, find what people actually book, repurpose 1 or 2 large rooms into 3 or 4 huddle spaces.
• No booking system or no enforcement. Ghost meetings (booked, never attended) make rooms look fully utilised on the calendar while sitting empty. Quick win: deploy or activate room booking with auto-release on no-show after 10 to 15 minutes, surfaced via in-room panels.
• Perceived unreliability. One bad call where the meeting couldn't start sticks in users' memories for months. The room gets an informal "don't book the corner room, the camera doesn't work" reputation that survives well past the fix. Quick win: a remote monitoring agent on every room reports faults before users hit them, and a visible status on each room's booking panel rebuilds confidence.
• Policy or culture mismatch. People don't think rooms are for hybrid, or think booking a room is a faff for a 20-minute call. Quick win: a short floor-walker session per floor showing the new room behaviour, plus exec-level use of the rooms for visible meetings.

A meeting room AV review starts with utilisation data and a room-by-room UX audit before recommending any hardware change, and a refresh of the room control layer often delivers the biggest single jump in actual use without a full hardware swap.

Quick reference: UX friction first, then wrong room sizing, then no booking enforcement, then perceived unreliability. Quick wins: simplify control panels, add booking auto-release, deploy remote monitoring.