Every time you make or receive a phone call it’s for a reason; there’s a point to be made, something to be communicated. Communicating effectively is critically important in business.

Anything that helps to make your message more clearly gives an advantage. Inversely, anything that makes it more difficult to communicate is, in reality, a threat to your business. This principle should be your guide as you select equipment for your small office or home office.

When considering home office telephony the technologically inclined often get bogged down in debate about the use of traditional phone service vs various forms of IP telephony. This is a big issue, with many complexities to be considered. However, there is a simpler issue that can have a dramatic impact on the enhancing your ability to communicate clearly; do you have a good headset?

My home office is I suspect fairly typical. At around 360 square feet it’s spacious for a home office. It’s a dedicated space with room for me to work, even create hardware havoc when necessary. I share the space with my ever-present office-assistants; our two Labrador Retrievers.

Typical of many homes, my office features drywall on the walls and carpet on the floor. If you stand in the middle of my office on a typical day you hear the accumulated sounds of various computers, office equipment, a ceiling fan and the air conditioner. It’s actually pretty quiet. I like it that way.

Having spent much of my career around broadcasting and recording studios I’ve learned that every room has something called “room tone.” It’s the ambient noise innate to the space. It stems from the combination of the various things occupying the space, external sounds from nearby, along with the nature of the room’s construction.

A room may be quiet, but it’s rarely ever silent. When picking up voice the greater the distance between the microphone and the talker the more the room tone impacts the captured sound. The same holds true for telephony.

One of the nice things about a home office is that you don’t need a lot of phones. To my mind that makes it easier to buy one or two truly great phones. For my office I chose Meeteasy Mini conference phone. This phone is excellent hardware, and just happen to have very good speakerphone capability.

Due to the web conferencing and Skype video call is more and more popular, we sometimes need to wear a headset for hours, my ear got pain and head is heavy after long discussion. so I bought a speakerphone, it is also from Meeteasy, the model is call MVOICE1000-B, a very budgeted item, but it free me totally, I can speak and listen even when walking around.

MVOICE1000-B

There are so many times that it is necessary to use a speakerphone. Those tend to be times when several people are gathered to participate in a call. In such circumstances there’s no substitute for great hardware.