What Is a Huddle Room & How Many Does Your Business Need?

• Collaboration Technology
• Hybrid & Remote Work
• Room Design

Summary:

A huddle room is a small meeting space designed to host short, impromptu meetings between 2 and 6 people at a time. Plan to have at least one huddle room for every six to 12 on-site employees, and keep the layout clean, simple, and organized. Install AV essentials like compact cameras, speakers, microphones, or all-in-one video boards and collaboration tools like interactive whiteboards.

What Is a Huddle Room & How Many Does Your Business Need?

Huddle rooms are small meeting spaces built for short, on-the-spot conversations, meetings, and collaboration sessions between two and six people at a time. They’re typically hybrid-compatible and contain just the essentials: a shared table, chairs, outlets for personal devices, and/or meeting room tech.

Spaces like these let you use office real estate more efficiently, while creating more opportunities for people to chat, problem-solve, and work through ideas together. Learn how many you need and how to design each huddle room effectively in this guide from ET Group.

How Many Huddle Spaces Do You Need?

A good rule of thumb is to have one huddle space for every 6-12 on-site employees at your workplace, but the exact number can vary depending on your space and workflows. To precisely determine how many huddle spaces you need, spend some time identifying patterns in the way people currently use your infrastructure. 

Working with a technology consultant can really help here, especially if you aren’t familiar with AV. They can spot red flags that existing spaces either don’t meet your needs or are inefficiently utilized.

Common examples include:

• Small groups booking large conference rooms or boardrooms.
• Employees competing for private space just to host or join calls.
• Meetings getting bumped or rescheduled according to importance/priority.
• Meetings that commonly involve fewer than six people at a time.

Huddle rooms can also be useful if you don’t have the real estate to add a larger meeting space to your office. You can set up a basic huddle room in as little as 100 to 150 square feet of space. You’ll need at least twice that if you want to deploy a new conference room or board room.

How to Design Effective Huddle Rooms

In huddle spaces, people need to be able to get in, get tasks done, and move on quickly. Everything in the space should directly support fast, focused collaboration in some way. The tips in this section will help you create an environment that supports quick, on-the-fly conversations and other short meet-ups.

1. Keep the Layout Compact

When space is this limited, every object in the room needs to earn its place. Focus on flexible, compact furnishings and fixtures that support collaboration without making the room feel crowded:

• Stackable or nesting chairs help keep the room clear when not in use.
• Taller tables encourage quick, stand-up-style chats so meetings stay short.
• U-shaped or hollow square layouts that encourage interaction and conversation.

Avoid large furniture like sofas, armchairs and bean bag chairs. They’re comfortable, but almost always take up too much space and make the room feel cramped.

2. Stick with Simple, Reliable Equipment

Choose essential AV equipment that feels minimal, intuitive, streamlined, and tailored to the layout of the space itself. Most people will bring their own devices in anyway, but you should also include:

• A single high-quality display or all-in-one video bar for hybrid-compatible videoconferencing.
• Easy-to-access outlets, USB ports, and connection points so people can plug in and get to work.
• Built-in microphones or speakers set into the table itself to keep surfaces clear.

Ceiling mic arrays, high-wattage speakers, and video walls are typically overkill in a space like this and can be completely overwhelming for participants. It’s better (and more affordable) to stick with simple solutions, deploy them with care, and make sure people know how to use them.

3. Include Collaboration Tools (Online or Off)

Collaboration looks different for everyone, so the space itself should include tools that can effectively support both in-person and hybrid workflows. Make tools that help people share ideas with one another and collaborate on projects in real-time available, including:

• Work accounts on fully-virtual whiteboard platforms like Miro, Canva, or MURAL.
• Interactive whiteboard displays that can handle video, audio, and note-taking at the same time.
• Microsoft Teams Rooms, Zoom Rooms, and other fully-integratable videoconferencing platforms.
• AI-powered note-taking tools baked into platforms like Microsoft Teams and Webex.

The key, here, is to temper simplicity with a user-first mindset. The room should feel casual enough that people can walk up to it and pop in without needing to schedule it in advance, but still contain all the best tools and platforms that support your workflows.

Essential AV Technology For Huddle Rooms in 2025

Because huddle spaces are so small, you don’t need much to set them up, but that doesn’t mean the equipment in them doesn’t matter. All of the products you’ll find in this chart perform well in smaller spaces and have features that make them stand out against the competition.

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Current Trends in Small Meeting Room Design

Smaller, agile meeting rooms are on the rise—and not just because businesses are trying to stretch infrastructure budgets further. People increasingly want small spaces like these to feel more natural, human-centric, and focused on “small-batch” collaboration as-it-happens.

At face value, this is about meeting people where they are and standardizing the meeting experience itself. But it also means curating experiences and elements like these:

• One-Touch Join. Platform-agnostic setups and one-touch join solutions make it easy for users to launch or join a meeting on any platform with a click, which means people waste less time.
• VR and AR Tech. New advancements are making it possible for hybrid teams to quite literally “get together” in VR, demo ideas in AR, and collaborate physically from different locations.
• AI-Powered Meeting Features. AI is increasingly becoming a standard across all meeting spaces because of the way it helps save time, preserves ideas, and ensures ideas aren’t lost after the fact.
• Privacy in Any Scenario. Special acoustic pods, micro-spaces and breakout zones are showing up more often, even in open offices. They give teams—and individuals—a quiet place to focus.
• Sustainability. From adding plants to recycling old hardware, teams want spaces that feel good to spend time in and do good for the planet—without what’s in them becoming tomorrow’s waste.
• UX-Focused Design. Small meeting spaces should “just work.” People are increasingly fed up with clunky interfaces, convoluted controls, and systems that take days to figure out.

Trends like these can help you design huddle rooms that actually draw people toward the space itself and convince them to make it a part of their process on a regular basis. But the more important takeaway is that spaces don’t have to be big or filled with expensive equipment to make an impact.

Let ET Group Design Your Next Huddle Space

So many businesses focus on designing meeting spaces for pre-scheduled events like monthly meetings, presentations, client calls, and strategic planning first. When smaller spaces like huddle room aren’t designed with the same care, they tend to sit unused instead of motivating people to work together.

ET Group designs smart, scalable, mission-critical meeting spaces for businesses in Canada’s top industries. We can help you design, develop, and deploy huddle spaces that support the ways your people work and help you reach your business goals, too. Book a discovery call to learn more!

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