Hybrid work has spent the last few years spreading out of the conference room. Today’s meetings start in corridors, get finished at a hot desk, and spill into whatever open corner has a screen and a webcam nearby.
Enterprise Teams Rooms rollouts haven't caught up with that. Most still follow the same running order they did when the category began: focus on the bookable conference rooms first, because they're the easiest spaces to plan around. Procurement can size the hardware and the business case stays simple: fewer, high-usage rooms, and a clear budget.
That's why the rest of the estate tends to wait. Geno Zaharie, Senior Director of Alliances and Ecosystem at QSC, has seen this happen across large rollouts:
“Once organizations have successfully deployed Microsoft Teams Rooms in the primary conference spaces, the next challenge is scaling a consistent collaboration experience across all the other spaces people work in.”
The spaces that come next are the ones nobody scoped from the start: conversation nooks, open collaboration areas, reconfigurable rooms, none of them built with a Teams Rooms spec in mind.
“The spaces that are hardest to standardize are usually the ones that weren't originally designed as meeting rooms at all.”
The Cost of Fragmentation
None of this stays a hardware problem for long, according to Zaharie. Manage huddle rooms, shared spaces and meeting-room entry points as separate systems instead of one platform, and friction soon follows:
“The operational consequences show up as fragmented user experiences, higher operational support costs, and no single view of workplace utilization.”
Without a shared view across the estate, IT ends up managing several small vendor relationships instead of one, troubleshooting each room type through a different support process, and reporting on utilisation with data that only covers part of the building.
None of it shows up as one obvious failure. It builds as extra admin that's easy to underestimate, until someone asks how the whole estate is performing.
