Everyone Is Back. What Is Your Workplace Telling You?
COLLAB AV | Insights & Perspectives
With teams returning from the summer break and the busiest months of the year ahead, now is the time to understand what is working—and what should change for 2027.
The out-of-office replies are disappearing. Trains are busier, meeting rooms are filling up and the familiar rhythm of customer visits, internal presentations, training sessions and company events is returning.
After the natural slowdown of summer, the corporate world is moving back towards full speed.
For workplace, IT and facilities teams, September is also when workplace technology planning for the following year begins to take shape.. The year is far from over, but attention is already beginning to turn towards the next one. Leadership teams are reviewing performance, budgets are being examined and projects that need to be completed before December are beginning to gain urgency. At the same time, the first conversations about next year’s priorities are taking place.
For workplace, IT and facilities teams, those conversations will inevitably include technology. There will be meeting rooms that need upgrading, displays approaching the end of their useful life, offices containing inconsistent systems and new projects that need to be included within the 2027 budget.
These are all perfectly sensible considerations.
But before deciding what to buy next year, organisations should perhaps spend some time understanding what this year has already taught them.
When the workplace returns to full speed
A quieter workplace can hide a surprising number of problems.
Meeting rooms appear more available. Networks are under less pressure. Support requests decline and people can find alternative spaces more easily. Technology that is only just coping can appear to be working perfectly well because fewer people are depending upon it.
Then everybody returns.
Rooms become busier, more meetings include remote participants and employees begin moving between offices again. Clients visit, training resumes and internal communications increase. Technology that seemed reliable during the quieter summer period is once again
being tested throughout the working day.
That is when the small frustrations begin to reappear.
A meeting takes longer to start because somebody cannot connect. A remote colleague struggles to hear everyone around the table. Employees avoid a particular room because they do not trust the technology. A space intended for six people is regularly used by twelve, while a larger room nearby remains empty because nobody is confident operating it.
Elsewhere, important company messages are being published but never reach employees who spend most of their day away from a desk. Reception technology works, but no longer reflects the organisation properly. Different offices use different systems and employees need to remember a new process every time they change location.
None of these issues necessarily represents a major technology failure. The systems may be switched on, the devices may be connected and every component may technically be doing what it was designed to do.
But the experience is still not working as well as it should.
This distinction matters because organisations are generally good at responding to obvious faults. When a display stops working or a camera fails completely, somebody reports it and action is taken. Workplace friction is more difficult to identify because people gradually learn to accommodate it.
They arrive early to meetings, carry their own adaptors, avoid certain rooms or join video calls individually from their laptops even when everyone is sitting in the same office. These workarounds are rarely documented. They simply become part of the working day.
Over time, something that should be regarded as a design problem begins to feel normal.
As we explored when considering why good AV equipment can still produce poor meeting rooms, technology can function correctly while still delivering a disappointing experience.
A camera may produce an excellent image but frame the wrong part of the room. A microphone may pass every technical test but fail to capture the people who need to be heard. A digital signage platform may distribute content perfectly while the information itself goes largely unnoticed.
The true measure of workplace technology is not simply whether it works. It is whether people can use it naturally, confidently and without unnecessary distraction.
September therefore provides something more valuable than a return to normal business activity. It gives organisations an opportunity to see their workplace operating under genuine pressure again.
The workplace begins to reveal where the problems are.
The question is whether anybody is listening.
The year-end technology trap
Most organisations already possess more information about their workplace than they realise.
It exists within support requests, room-booking patterns, employee feedback and the everyday experience of IT and facilities teams. It appears in the rooms people choose to use and those they quietly avoid. It can be found in meetings that regularly begin late, repeated requests for help and the collection of improvised cables that has somehow accumulated in the boardroom cupboard.
This information may not sit within a formal dashboard, but that does not make it any less valuable. Sometimes the clearest understanding comes from speaking to the people who use and support the environment every day.
Employees know which rooms they prefer. IT teams know which systems generate the most support calls. Remote participants know whether they feel included in important conversations. New starters can often reveal whether a technology experience is genuinely intuitive because they have not yet learned the organisation’s workarounds.
Together, those experiences provide a far more useful starting point for future planning than an equipment catalogue.
The difficulty is that the final quarter often brings a different kind of pressure. Budgets need to be used, projects need to be approved and equipment needs to be ordered within a particular financial period. The desire to make progress can quickly become a requirement to make a purchase.
There is nothing wrong with using an available budget to improve workplace technology. Delaying a necessary project can create its own costs and frustrations. The danger arises when the deadline becomes more important than the outcome.
A concern about hybrid meetings can quickly become a request for new cameras. A communication problem can become a digital signage shopping list. A desire to improve collaboration can turn into a plan to install the same meeting-room system everywhere.
Somewhere between recognising the problem and approving the budget, the product becomes the project.
That is the wider issue we considered in Stop Buying AV. Start Designing Experiences..
Technology obviously needs to be specified, purchased and installed, but the specification should be the result of understanding the problem. It should not become a substitute for understanding it.
The most useful year-end budget conversation is therefore not about what an organisation can buy before December. It is about what the organisation has learned during the year and where investment could make something genuinely better.
That small change in emphasis can lead to very different decisions.
It might reveal that an existing display is perfectly suitable and the real problem lies with audio coverage. It may show that a room does not need more sophisticated technology, but a simpler and more consistent control experience. It could demonstrate that user training would resolve an issue more effectively than replacing equipment or that a room needs to be redesigned around the way it is now used.
A considered technology review does not need to become a justification for replacing everything.
Quite the opposite.
Understanding what an organisation already owns can help protect previous investment and ensure future budgets are directed towards the areas where they will create the greatest value. Some rooms may need a complete redesign, but others may require only a carefully targeted improvement. A wider programme might begin with one priority space and develop gradually as existing systems reach the appropriate point for replacement.
This is not a lack of ambition.
It is a more intelligent way to invest.
A better way to prepare for 2027
Not every organisation needs to complete a major workplace transformation before the end of the year. In many cases, the most valuable use of the final quarter is to investigate, assess and test.
A workplace technology review can identify the spaces creating the greatest frustration, equipment approaching the end of its useful life and inconsistencies that make the wider estate difficult to support. A site survey may establish that the perceived technology problem is being influenced by acoustics, lighting, furniture or room layout. Conversations with users can reveal where the technical view of a space differs from the everyday experience.
A pilot can then allow an organisation to experience a proposed solution within its own environment before committing to a wider rollout.
This is where a properly structured Try Before You Buy programme becomes particularly valuable. A pilot should do much more than demonstrate that a product switches on and joins a call. It should show whether employees can use it without assistance, whether remote participants can hear and see everyone and whether the solution integrates effectively with the organisation’s existing platforms, network and support processes.
Testing technology within the real environment turns assumptions into evidence. It allows decisions to be influenced by the people who will actually use and support the solution, reducing the risk of repeating the same mistake across several rooms or offices.
The final quarter also creates an opportunity to think beyond individual projects.
Workplace technology has traditionally been approached one room or requirement at a time. There is a boardroom project, a meeting-room project, a reception display project and perhaps a separate programme for digital signage or room booking.
From a project-delivery perspective, that division can make perfect sense. From the perspective of an employee or visitor, it makes considerably less sense.
People do not experience a collection of technology projects. They experience one workplace.
If every meeting room behaves differently, the organisation has created a usability problem.
If several offices use different signage platforms, it has created an unnecessary management burden. If the reception area communicates one identity while the client meeting rooms create another, the workplace can feel disconnected even when every individual system works.
This is why corporate AV and workplace technology increasingly needs to be considered at an organisational level.
That does not mean every space should contain identical equipment. A small collaboration room should not be designed like an executive boardroom, and a flexible training space will have different requirements from a reception or company auditorium.
Consistency is not the same as uniformity.
The objective is to create familiar experiences where familiarity helps, common platforms where standardisation creates value and appropriate differences where the purpose of a space demands them. Employees should understand how to begin, IT teams should understand how systems are managed and new rooms should be able to follow an established approach rather than starting again every time.
Thinking in this way also changes how organisations approach support.
Technology planning often focuses heavily on the moment of installation. Considerable attention is given to selecting products, agreeing specifications and completing the work, but much less thought is given to what happens during the years that follow.
Workplace technology is not static. Collaboration platforms change, firmware needs updating, warranties expire and manufacturers alter their support policies. Organisations grow, offices move and the way people use spaces continues to evolve.
A room that works perfectly today still needs a clear support and lifecycle plan.
The final quarter is therefore a useful time to understand not only what should be installed next, but what already exists. Organisations need visibility of ageing equipment, unsupported devices and recurring issues. They need to know who is responsible when something fails and whether problems can be identified before they interrupt an important meeting.
As we discussed in our article about proactive and reactive AV support, waiting for technology to fail at the moment somebody needs it is rarely an effective strategy.
Support should not be something considered after an installation has been completed.
It should be part of the original plan.
Next year’s workplace begins with better questions
January has a habit of arriving quickly.
New budgets become available, distant projects become immediate priorities and teams begin trying to resolve problems that were already visible months earlier. Suppliers are
asked for proposals, products are compared and specifications are developed.
The result can be urgency without clarity.
The final quarter offers an alternative.
It gives organisations time to observe the workplace when it is busy, understand the experience of the people using it and identify where technology is creating unnecessary friction. It provides an opportunity to review support history, understand lifecycle risks and test possible improvements within the environments where they will eventually be used.
Most importantly, it allows IT, facilities, workplace teams and AV specialists to become involved early enough to influence the direction of the project rather than simply respond to a specification that has already been written.
Some improvements may still be completed before the end of the year. Others may become pilots, phased upgrades or part of a wider 2027 programme. Some proposed purchases may prove unnecessary once the real problem has been understood.
That is still progress.
Because the businesses that create the best workplaces next year will not necessarily be those that buy the most technology before this year ends.
They will be the ones that take the time to understand what needs to become better.
At COLLAB AV, we believe that is where every workplace technology conversation should begin. Before recommending products, we want to understand how an organisation communicates, how its people use their spaces and where technology is currently helping or hindering the experience.
That might lead to an individual meeting-room improvement, a pilot environment, a new office project or a longer-term strategy across multiple spaces and locations. Whatever the eventual solution, the starting point remains the same.
Not what should we buy next?
But what do we want to make better?
And the final quarter is the perfect time to begin that conversation.
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