Numbered rooms in the workplace

Question

What are the disadvantages (if any) to having numbered rooms in an office?

Numbering rooms is obviously helpful as a way to navigate to a room and to unambiguously talk about a precise room.

Are there any disadvantages to numbering rooms? (These could be tangible, psychological, or social reasons, etc.)

Answer 1

The question was disadvantages to numbering rooms.

There is one disadvantage I can think of: If the interior walls are expected to change, Or the number of employees is expected to grow a lot before the lease is up: Numbers an make the changes even more confusing.

I have seen companies turn a conference room into new offices. Now you could have the problem that conference room was #007, but now one of the new rooms will be 007 1/2 or 007A.

I have also seen closets turned into office space. If you forgot to number the closet, now you have to stuff two people into an unnumbered space, and describe it as the 2nd unnumbered door after #007.

Turning offices into conference rooms or senior mangers offices results in the need to skip a number.

All these changes result in confusion. Employees room numbers change without them moving, others refer to the space as "we are meeting in room which used to be #007 before Joe retired and they redid the floor when the new CEO was hired"

The advantages are many: navigation, logistics. These are so important once the lack of room identification it is time to develop a numbering or naming scheme.

Keep in mind that employees may start to name the rooms themselves. They will say "I see you were assigned Sean's old office, he was here long before Daniel"

Answer 2

To start with, when there are many rooms in workplace, numbers are hard to beat - exactly for the reasons you mention. In cases like this, numbers provide the most convenient way to navigate to a room (one of a many others) and to unambiguously talk about a precise room.

Numbers are also quite handy for "bureaucratic" purposes, like eg tracking equipment / furniture location, movement and delivery.

When there are not that many rooms, or when there is small specific subset like conference rooms, it can make sense to give rooms non-numeric, "personalized" names. These are more fun and (when there are not many rooms) are easier to memorize. This appears to be quite a popular practice, just search the web for something like conference rooms names. ^{1, 2, 3, ...}

• Note "personalized" names don't necessarily exclude an option to use room numbering in parallel. For "bureaucratic" purposes, boring numbers may be still more convenient, especially when there could be room renaming.
  ^{Room 42 has been recently renamed from "Alpha Centauri" to, well, "42"}

Answer 3

Room numbers serve two purposes: they identify the physical location and provide cues to help people navigate to the room.

Modern "Class A" office space for a variety of reasons are usually configured as open plan or modular, so the navigational benefits of a number are less useful. If you are in an older building with a series of rooms, a numbering system makes sense.