The most controversial question in any office

What to call the conference rooms

In Quartz’s first office in New York, we had just one conference room, so we called it “the conference room.”

When we moved to our second office, which had five rooms, everyone was very excited to name them. Opinions were solicited, debates were had, votes were held. It proved to be the most controversial question about the office, more contentious even than the temperature.

In the end, perhaps owing to the wide variety of views on the subject, we never named the rooms. They were known by their drab defaults—main conference room, conference room A, conference room B, conference room C, and conference D—for the length of our stay in that office.

So, as we moved into Quartz’s third office in New York this week, it was clear the conference rooms needed to be named from day one. We solicited opinions but didn’t put it to a vote. The main principles were that the names had to be Quartzy, follow a common theme, and be easy to remember. (One longstanding proposal, naming the rooms after forms of the mineral quartz, was ruled out because the Pyroxene Room would get annoying real quick.)

There is no such thing as a great conference room name. I’ve seen offices that name their rooms after animals (groan), local landmarks (yawn), and “influencers” (GMAFB). The best you can hope for is a naming convention that’s not as bad as those. But that’s harder than it may seem.

We ended up naming the conference rooms in our new headquarters after cities where Quartz has an office or significant presence: London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, New Delhi, Nairobi, San Francisco, and Washington, DC. As an added touch, we’re going to invite staff who work in those locations to help decorate their respective conference rooms from afar or when they come through New York, a small way to exude a bit of Quartziness and maintain connections with our many employees around the world. (We’re also going to do the portal to the London office that Akshat suggested.)

After a week in the new office, people seem OK with the conference room names and have more-or-less memorized where they are. Plenty of jokes have been made about meeting with London in Hong Kong, and so on, but nobody seems to think the names are terrible. So, victory.

Here’s a map of the space with the rooms and some other spaces labeled:

Some parts of the office, including the Quartzy spaces, are still in progress, with everything to be fully completed this summer. But all the conference rooms have tables, chairs, doors that close, and—finally—names.