‘Megalodon’ and ‘Transformers’ — How Companies Select Conference Room Themes
What does your company conference room theme say about your company? As businesses plan the buildout of their office space, one of the common discussions is about how many conference rooms they should account for, how big those rooms should be, and where the rooms should live within the office. At SquareFoot, we typically recommend a conference room for every 1,000 square feet.
Once construction gets underway, the company can turn their attention to the creative pursuit of naming the conference rooms. Different ideas and approaches exist from company to company, depending on the culture and style of a given organization. What’s nice about this aspect of planning a new office is that there’s no wrong way to do it. Some companies are more traditional in scope, while others opt for a playful feel.
To find out about recommendations and considerations when it comes to conference room nomenclature, we spoke with a handful of experts who’ve led these kinds of buildouts in the past. Here’s what they had to say.
Fitting the build
BounceX, a marketing tech company, was looking to renovate their nearly 80,000-foot space encompassing two floors of One World Trade Center in NYC. Dayla Keller, Director of Office Operations and Culture, turned to Gensler, a veteran partner in design and architecture. Together, they “selected a collection of unique pieces of art to serve as inspiration,” Keller said. “Each room is inspired by one of those works of art, which gives every space its own personality, vibe and experience.” Once the design was in place, “we sat down for hours and chose names that fit each room based on the feelings and emotions that each piece of art evoked.”
Others inherited their chosen themes. When Katie Birch, Manager of Employee Experience for DigitalOcean, a cloud infrastructure provider, joined the company in 2014, they already had four conference rooms at their NYC offices, and they came with an “Under the Sea” aquatic theme. When the team expanded to take on two full floors in the building, that meant coming up with even more water-related names. So Birch“sent around a poll to our entire company to cast ideas and vote on them. For example, our ‘employee space’ was decided based on the majority of the company voting for an employee’s suggestion of the ‘Lagoon.’”
Some have taken their naming cues from executives. Reut Mizrahi, Administrative Director of Taboola, a native advertising platform, said the theme for their Israel-based headquarters went with a superheroes theme because Taboola’s Founder / CEO Adam Singolda is a super-fan. “As we expanded to NYC, we continued the tradition and named the meeting rooms after superheroes, too. Adam’s office is wallpapered with Transformers (as well as a few Transformer toys peppered throughout). As we grew — we are currently at 20 offices around the world — it was becoming increasingly challenging to find more superheroes who were ‘the good guys and gals,’” joked Mizrahi. Having a uniform method to conference rooms can create cohesion and community across multiple office locations.
Convey the culture
Picking a theme that carries the weight of your company culture and employee experience is critical, experts say. Cheri Dannels, Office Experience Manager at Cockroach Labs, a software company, said that “We chose ‘resilient species’ as a theme for naming our conference rooms, as resilience speaks to both our product and company name. These names serve as both a reminder to ourselves of what we’re creating every day, but also an introduction to our company and our culture for clients and candidates.”
Keller at BounceX agreed that her company’s values come through loud and clear. “Our conference rooms are as unique as we are as a company. At our core, BounceX is all about individuality and culture, and our eclectic, themed conference rooms are an extension of that,” she continued, “In designing the office, we wanted to have conference rooms of all sizes, shapes, sensory levels and volumes so that everyone can find a nook where they felt at home.”
The theme for the conference rooms may also be one element of an even larger topic, said Birch of Digital Ocean. “From our own company mascot (Sammy the Shark) to our annual engagement surveys (The Tide), everything follows an aquatic theme, not just our conference rooms. It creates a unique and memorable experience for our employees, and even folks who visit our office. Who isn’t going to remember a conference room named ‘Megalodon?’”
Be deliberate about it
In truth, the conference rooms need to reflect the office space as a whole. Even if you have the most creative and bright conference rooms, if they don’t fit the rest of the aesthetic of the office, they’ll stand out as strange. “In designing BounceX’s new space, we didn’t want to have any hierarchical spaces, there are no individual offices, and all of the employees’ desks are on the outside loop, with stunning views at every seat,” said Keller at BounceX. “The office features alternating densities between areas that are meant for congregation and collaboration versus those meant for meetings and individual work.”
The hope at Digital Ocean, said Birch, was to convey a healthy mix of hard work and also good fun. “From the second you walk off the elevator, you immediately feel like you have walked into the ocean with our underwater designed elevator murals. All of our offices follow the same color scheme with a carpet reminiscent of the ocean with wide stripes of ocean blues.” she said.
And when it comes to plotting out the rooms, you can find smart ways to bring the theme to life. Dannels at Cockroach Labs said, “In naming each conference room, we choose to assign names alphabetically. Some species aren’t as well known, like the ancient fish Coelacanth, so it’s easier to remember where the room is by following the alphabet around the office. Our largest room just happened to also be the only resilient species that was a plant, Gingko Biloba.” You’re educating people, too, indirectly and helping them grow more comfortable at work.
