Room names: Creative themes and best practices

Conference room names offer a fun way for businesses to connect with and inspire team members. Creative names can showcase a company’s brand values and personality. Naming your rooms well can invite a little creativity into the workplace, while also making the office easier to navigate. 

In this article, we explore conference room name ideas and the best naming practices for a well integrated office. 

Why are meeting room names important?

Meeting room names are important because they help make a workspace more engaging. They also aid in both branding and navigation. 

Yes, ‘Conference Room 2A’’ will work, but it’s hardly inspiring.

Using numbers alone can be especially problematic in large organizations with many different workspaces, boardrooms, and other meeting spaces. As the numbers increase, they get harder to find and track.    

Facility managers (FMs) and their organizations typically put great effort into developing floor plans with maximized space utilization and complex flexible seating. 

That same care and effort should be put into creating motivational and inspiring room names. Creative room names are more than just a bit of fun! Creative room names will also be easier to remember, helping to eliminate confusion and boost the employee experience; ‘Let’s meet in the New York Room’ is a lot easier to remember than ‘Let’s meet in Assembly Hall 4701C.’

Moreover, room names can be a lovely addition to existing branding efforts. 

As we’ll cover with examples below, companies of all sizes use their meeting room names to convey their brand and their values. This helps create workplaces that represent their ethos as much as their products and services do. This can be especially important for meeting rooms that are for interactions with clients and guests. 

Finally, unique meeting room names are more easily found and distinguished on interactive maps of the office. This improves wayfinding in the office. 

What is wayfinding?

What is wayfinding? It’s the tools and systems that people use to navigate—or ‘find’ their ‘way’–around a physical space. 

Improving wayfinding in an office setting can help improve employee experience, lead to better request management, streamline employee onboarding, create a better visitor experience, support hybrid working and innovation in the workplace, and even improve health and safety. 

To realize these benefits, FMs need to think holistically about wayfinding, creating a space that is intuitive and easy-to-use. Creative room names can be an important piece of this puzzle. The best conference ones make the office both easy and fun to navigate, thus aiding in wayfinding. 

Creative theme examples

It’s not just small tech startups who are thinking outside the box when it comes to creative room names, although they’re certainly leading the charge. 

FMs looking to develop a system for naming conference rooms may want to look to the following companies for inspiration. 

• Elon Musk is known for his unique name choices, and SpaceX is no exception—famously naming their conference rooms after locations on Mars as well as scientists influential in the space industry
• Nike names its rooms after popular athletes (and Nike-wearers, naturally) like Michael Jordan, Ronaldo, and Tiger Woods
• Pinterest took a page out of their own users’ pinning books, naming their conference rooms after popular pins like Hipster Babies, Beach Wedding, and Crock Pot
• The Food Network keeps things fresh with conference rooms named after fruit 
• Instagram jumped on the Game of Thrones bandwagon, coming up with room names like ‘Dragonstone,’ ‘King’s Landing,’ and ‘Riverrunn’
• Moz embraces geekdom, naming their rooms after movies and comic books, topping it off by naming the CEO’s office ‘The Wizard of MOZ’

As you can see, these are more than just cool room names—they’re names that actually bring the brand to life. The right room name theme can help manifest a brand’s vision, bringing the conceptual into the concrete, physical space of the office.

How do you name a board room? 

So how do you name a board room or a workspace in a way that reflects your company culture?

First, you’ll want to stay on brand and reflect your company and your industry. 

That’s why Nike names its rooms after athletes, not musicians. A craft beer company might want to name their rooms after different drinks. Or a small tech company might want to stick to a Star Wars theme.

Other common conference room name ideas include city names, local landmarks, trees, national parks, parts of technology, movies, plants, animals, authors, world leaders, movie stars, directors, and famous artists.

At OfficeSpace, we’ve chosen to keep it local. The meeting rooms in our Victoria, British Columbia office have names that relate to favorite local parks. Examples include ‘Goldstream,’ ‘Ruckle,’ and ‘Juan de Fuca.’ Meanwhile, our Costa Rica office chose national parks as its theme—think ‘Cahuita,’ ‘Monteverde,’ and ‘Puerto Viejo.’ 

How many offices are filled with both live and artificial plants? It’s human nature to want to bring a bit of nature indoors. Choosing local parks like we have embraces this drive and helps make a more enjoyable workspace.  

City names are also popular choices, especially for companies managing a spread out hybrid workforce.

Embrace creative themes

Don’t be afraid to get creative or have a little fun when naming your office rooms. Simpsons characters, 90s’ pop stars, or action characters—Chuck Norris Activity Room, anyone?—can all work, assuming they’re on brand.  

You might want to let the design of the room determine its name—ie.: the Blue Room or the Plant Room.

Alternatively, you might want to let the name of the room dictate how it’s decorated. For example, the ‘Batcave’ gets framed vintage Batman posters, while the Superhero room is papered in comic strips.  

You can also let the type of work help dictate the name of the same. So that anyone sticking with the Simpsons theme would be wise to name the Break Room after Homer Simpson (assuming there’s always a box of donuts on the counter)! Along these same lines, the quiet spaces for focusing on work could have names after industrious Lisa. Bart could be the namesake for the company game room. And of course, the conference room, where everyone gathers, could be Moe’s Tavern.    

Another best practice for naming rooms in the office is to try to pick a theme that can expand easily. Anything too specific and you could get stuck for choices down the line. So go with ‘famous female authors’ instead of ‘famous female authors from England in the late 1800s.’ 

Finally, once you’ve picked a theme, stick with it. For example, once Nike committed to using athletes, they’re better to stick with this theme than to jump to general sports terms, even if that would technically still be on brand. 

The best source for conference room names

Perhaps the best tip for naming a board room and other meeting rooms is to bring employees into the decision. Everyone wants more collaboration in the workplace, so why not bring your team into brainstorming how the workplace will actually look and feel?

This is how Etsy approached naming their conference rooms, where employees settled on both food and musicians. The result? Room names like Fleetwood Mac & Cheese and the Rolling Scones, wonderfully on brand for the quirky company. 

More best practices for conference rooms

FM responsibilities include overall facilities maintenance and ensuring employees have all the tools they need to thrive. Coming up with clever room names is certainly only the start of a better organized office. 

As we’ve covered, memorable room names can make navigating the office a bit easier. But nothing compares to interactive maps and a Visual Directory.

This can help employees and visitors find their right meeting space right away, while also giving them a picture into who else is using the workspace. 

Digital meeting room signage can also be particularly useful because it can integrate with an organization’s existing Integrated Workplace Management System (IWMS) to further improve wayfinding, updating in real time on whether a room is in use or booked. 

Robust meeting room booking software is also critical for any dynamic office. 

What are good names for a room? 

Good names for rooms in an office are ones that will help employees feel connected and inspired, and hopefully proud to work where they do. 

Ultimately, the best conference room names are clear, consistent, and on brand. 

OfficeSpace makes it easy for employees to find their way around the office, no matter what room names you’re using. Reach out for a free demo. 

Photos: ismagilov, Rawpixel, Jopwell, Max Vakhtbovych