Your clients hear your office before they hear you.

There’s more to it though, because almost nobody considers what their room sounds like.
That’s the half of your video presence you’ve never managed.

A hard floor, bare walls, a desk marooned in the middle of an empty room: it all produces echo. On a call, echo reads as empty. Empty reads as temporary. Temporary reads as someone who hasn’t quite set up properly yet, which is the last thing a senior expert wants a new client to hear in the first thirty seconds.

Sound made the 2026 essentials lists this year. Decorilla and Sierra Living Concepts are both naming acoustics a core part of the home office setup now, not merely a nice-to-have, mostly because so many of us take client calls from rooms that were never built for calls in the first place.

I’ve sat on calls where the person was clearly excellent at what they did but the room made them sound like they were phoning in from an empty corridor.

The words were right. The sound undercut them.

Your client doesn’t think ‘bad acoustics.’ They just feel, faintly, that something’s off, though they can’t quite put their finger on it.
That feeling attaches to you, not to the room.

The fix is soft surfaces. Something textured behind you: a bookcase, a curtain, an upholstered panel.
A rug helps if the floor’s hard. Even a throw over the back of a chair just out of frame does real work. Soft things absorb the echo that hard things bounce around.

This doesn’t mean you need foam tiles or a studio. It takes enough soft surface to stop the room ringing.

One thing to do this week

Record twenty seconds of yourself talking, the way you would on a call.
Then play it back with your eyes closed: listening, not watching.
If you hear an echo, or a hollowness behind your voice, or even the hum of the room, that’s what every client has been hearing under your expertise. Add one soft surface and record again.

Find your zone

Your call presence runs through the microphone as much as the camera, and most people only ever manage the camera. There are many aspects of an effective home office that often just need an additional item or a tweak, to get your work space to work as hard as you do.

Not sure which zone you should start with first?

The workspace quiz takes two minutes: dezyna.com/quiz