Why do many businesses name their meeting rooms? The simple answer is to reflect company culture and ethos. And for many organizations, it’s about showing there’s a playful side to work.
What’s the secret to meeting room names?
Honestly, there isn’t one. But it’s probably worth revisiting if these workspace names have become stale – or if you’re looking for a collaborative way to encourage team participation and foster a sense of community. Plus, naming your meeting rooms is an easy way to help keep your workspaces organized and memorable.
With today’s employee freedom of choice and hybrid work schedules, being playful and encouraging socialization is where it’s at … Turns out, we want to socialize and collaborate a lot more than you might think, especially now in the era of flexibility.
More and more visitors and employees are returning to the office or other workplace environments, according to the most recent data from our parent brand Eptura.
From our 2023 survey of 6,700 employees:
- Employees rank socializing the number one reason to visit the office
- Collaborating with co-workers is number two
- Establishing a boundary between work and home is number three
In fact, the number of visitors per location is now higher than pre-pandemic levels across all industries and regions. Plus, meeting room scheduling and desk bookings are way up year over year at a global level, so representing a fun and playful culture with meeting room names is a great way to reinforce a fresh point of view.
Want a deep dive into employee preferences and behaviors? Check out the latest Workplace Index report.
After a few years of being in close proximity to family, roommates, and pets during the pandemic while working, we’re more than ready for collaboration and one-on-one conversations with our friends at work – and our managers.
In fact, a few of our customers have their own dedicated workplace culture teams that are focused intently on attracting employees to collaborate in person.
How to devise a meeting room name strategy
There are a multitude of ways to come up with a name for a meeting room, but the most common approach is to use a theme, be it a movie, TV series, or something related to the products you sell or the work you do. Themes help you cover an array of meeting rooms easily.
Was your office buzzing after binging “Game of Thrones”? Do you have a lot of foodies or wine lovers on your team? Serious music or Marvel fans? Maybe you want to pick all the regions of Italy or names of amphibious animals?
Whatever you choose, try to make it interactive and democratic with employees, so they feel part of the process. Plus, you want to be sure your strategy for naming meeting rooms is reflective of the times we’re in. Make sure to work with your diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) leaders and human resources teams. The last thing any facility manager or administrative team wants is to unnecessarily offend or divide employees.
Also, be careful not to inadvertently name your meeting spaces something so generic that it ends up confusing employees. Case in point, Quora answerer Claude Baudoin, explained an unfortunate mishap with a meeting room name.
I once worked in a building in Silicon Valley where conference rooms had … major city names in alphabetical order: Athens, Bangkok, … I can’t remember all the names, [one] was Geneva. One day, a … manager was invited to participate in a big corporate think tank about some equally big corporate initiative. The memo said “the meeting will be in Geneva on such date…” So, he showed up on the given day at our Geneva conference room while the rest of the people were in Switzerland.
Whoops. Hope they had great video conferencing equipment. Wink.
4 great examples of meeting room names
One of the best ways to get started is to take a closer look at how some companies have been naming their meeting rooms and workspaces over the years.
Many of Condeco’s clients and partners have used innovative ways to name their meeting rooms, and getting to take a sneak peek at them is part of the fun of helping integrate our meeting room booking solutions.
We took a look at some of the more fun and creative ways to incorporate your meeting room into your overall business culture with a significant naming theme – here’s what some of the big names in digital and social have named their meeting rooms:
At Instagram’s California workspace, rooms have different, wacky themes and clever pun names. One example is the Are you Afraid of the Darkroom, which is, as referenced by its moniker, a room specifically used for photographs to process analogy photographs. In true millennial form, fit for Instagram, the name comes from a beloved 90s kid’s TV show.
Instagram’s Californian workspace was designed by Gensler, with the brief to design a space which “feels like a 3D version of the app”. Mission accomplished. Over on the east coast, the New York Instagram offices take their cue from their surroundings, naming conference rooms after traditional New York mainstays, such as Blair Waldorf (aka the iconic millennial character from TV show Gossip Girl) or Dollar Hot Dog, after the classic, well, one dollar NY hot dog.
New Relic
High on the 28th floor of the US Bank Tower in Portland, Oregon, New Relic’s company of developers occupy 19,000 square feet of space. Somewhat fittingly for an office that’s located so high up, looking down over the glistening streets below, New Relic’s meeting rooms are all named after superheroes, with cartoon-esque imagery stenciled on the glass walls that divide each room. It’s an amusing, geeky in-joke for the hoard of tech experts who work there, many of whom are no doubt first in line at every new Marvel release!
Image Source: TechCrunch
BuzzFeed
The bastion of millennial and generation Z digital content, BuzzFeed carry their own signature bright yellow ‘reaction’ buttons through to their meeting rooms; visitors can expect to find themselves greeting BuzzFeed employees in a room named WTF, LOL, OMG or WIN. Whether a true representation of BuzzFeed itself, or more of an ironic nod to the internet generation that spawned it, these meeting rooms surely create absurd little moments when visitors find themselves checking into WTF, and that’s no doubt part of the fun.
Image source: Business Insider
Etsy
Etsy provides a platform for creative types from all over the globe to sell their wares, so it makes complete sense for them to be more inventive than average with their meeting room names. Creating monikers out of a mash-up of two things pretty much everyone on the planet loves – food and music – the pun-based labels of their conferences will raise a chuckle from even the most serious among us: think Fleetwood Mac ‘n’ Cheese, Wu Tang Clams, the Rolling Scones, Johnny Cashews, Pjork, Oreo Speedwagon and Soy Division.
Image source: IFLArchitecture.com
Facebook perhaps thought outside of the box a little more than some of their contemporaries, as their conference rooms are named after famous products from infomercials. The Snuggie, Shake Weight and Thighmaster are all represented here, so maybe it’s Facebook’s intention to remind you of those embarrassing late–night purchases you’ve made? Come on, we’ve all been there.
