7 Mistakes When Picking Meeting Room Names

Have you ever been to one of those suburban housing developments where all the street names are slight variations on the same phrases? Ridgecrest Street, Ridgemont Street, Crestmont Street, Crestridge Street… and so on. If it weren’t for your smartphone with GPS, you’d never find your way out. Naming conference rooms can have the exact same effect, if you don’t avoid these seven common mistakes that companies make when planning their offices. 

It’s a good idea to select a theme for your meeting room names, but if you pick a theme that leads to a lot of similar names (see suburban street-naming example above), you’ll create endless frustration for the employees. Names of famous cities allow for clarity and easy recognition, whereas if you choose the names of the 13 dwarves from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, you’d get points for creativity and complaints when people can’t remember if their meeting is happening in Dori or Nori.  

The temptation to use letters and numbers is strong. You might like the idea of SW-501, and NE-302, for “southwest corner, fifth floor, meeting room one” and “Northeast corner, third floor, meeting room two,” but instead of using the meeting room naming convention as an opportunity to inspire, you’ve created something akin to the Dewey Decimal System, which new employees and guests will resent deeply.

You want to use names that express the culture of the company, but often inside jokes and slang can appear insensitive to people who are visiting or who don’t feel comfortable in the culture yet. There’s nothing wrong with being silly or whimsical, especially if that’s the vibe your company puts off anyway, but it’s a good idea to run your list of names by an outsider just to check for blind spots or faux pas.

Which is to say, you don’t have to name your conference rooms after breakfast cereals or famous people to be creative. The key is to pick a theme that connects with your values, mission, or history as a company and tie each name to that theme. If you have an architecture firm you might choose the names of famous architects or buildings. If you have a law firm you could select from historic cases. On the simpler side, maybe your engineering company decides to use names of principles in physics or names of fasteners (such as turnbuckle, wingnut, clevis, and carriage bolt). Complicated or esoteric isn’t better than an interesting theme with simple names.

Let’s say your company works in chemistry or molecular biology. You could name your conference rooms after elements in the periodic table, but you should stop short of using the names of compounds (such as phenylalanine, or acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene) unless they’re common knowledge to all your employees, not just the highly specialized people. This mistake ties closely to the next one as well. The names of your conference rooms will be used many times a day, so you want to strike a balance between relevance, utility, and interest.

As mentioned in mistake number 5, using names from chemistry might feel highly relevant and interesting, but you run the risk of constantly embarrassing and frustrating people who struggle to pronounce such names. For example, you might pick names from a foreign language for your meeting rooms (perhaps the names of Italian wine regions, or french cheeses) — this could be an excellent theme if you’re in the food or beverage industry where there is high familiarity and competence with the language, not so much if you’re running a petroleum business. As long as the names are accessible to the employees and you provide pronunciation keys on the meeting room name displays, you should be fine. Alternately, if you decide to use phrases or overlong words for your meeting room names be prepared for people to shorten them in conversation. Nicknames can be fun or awkward, best to consider which is more likely.

Maybe you decide to name your conference rooms after the Great Lakes of North America, that’ll give you five memorable, easy-to-say names, but if you have 10 conference rooms to name, or you expand to a larger office, you need a new theme. That doesn’t meet that every office location has to work from the same theme, but it’s worth looking for themes that can be expanded when needed. 

• Constellations
• Geographic Locations
• National Parks
• Foods
• Fictional Characters
• Sports Teams
• Local Landmarks (Neighborhoods, Streets, etc.)
• Historical Touchpoints (Battles, Kingdoms, Epochs, etc.)
• Prominent Figures In Your Industry (Telsa, Edison, Westinghouse, Kilby, etc.)

There are a lot of factors to consider when naming conference rooms, but the only hard and fast rule should be to consider the culture you want to build and make sure the theme enhances or respects your brand, your workplace identity, and your employees.

i.e.Smart Systems is a Houston, TX based technology integration partner that specializes in design and installation of audio/visual technology and structured cabling. For more than three decades, our team of in-house experts has partnered with business owners, architectural firms, general contractors, construction managers, real estate developers, and designers in the Houston market, to deliver reliable, scalable solutions that align with their unique goals.