Commentary
Five ways to infuse brand into your workplace
Planning for and creating the best employee experience needs to begin as early as site selection.
December 14, 2017
Planning for and creating the best employee experience needs to begin as early as site selection. Aaron Spiess, Managing Director of JLL’s brand experience firm, Big Red Rooster, recently outlined for Work Design Magazine how companies can cultivate an immersive brand experience in the workplace:
- Look around now—how do employees currently experience your brand within the work space? Brand begins with the people who experience it, so first and foremost, understand who you are planning for. What are employee wants, desires and unmet needs in the space you currently occupy? Identify areas of opportunity with surveys, one-on-one conversations and benchmarking. Goals in the fact-finding period should be to learn how employees are interacting with the brand at work today, and also how well current practices are feeding their human experience. What can be improved upon in the future?
- Does your real estate portfolio align with your brand? Do the actual buildings in which your teams work align with your cultural values and priorities? Articulating your brand’s unique culture throughout the portfolio decision-making process can help create meaning in processes like site selection and mobility strategy. Data-driven processes like demographics and real estate visualization can help organizations see which locations do, or do not, align with brand values.
- How can you build out interior areas that allow employees to fully immerse themselves in the brand? To design a space that orchestrates a positive, relevant human experience with the brand, consider how the layout itself can influence a person’s approach to their work. Break down silos to encourage cross-collaboration. An example of this is creating a neighborhood or activity based space that fuels accidental collisions and face-to-face conversations.
- Why this, instead of that? Investigate the “why” behind every piece of potential brand expression before signing a property contract and/or engaging a designer. Remember, brand does not solely live in the logo or the architecture. It lives in the hearts and minds of people. Authentic brand expression in the workplace should be purposeful and intuitive, not just aesthetic.
- Gut-check: Does the space still work with the overarching brand messages? Or does it feel like a contradiction? All the pieces in corporate brand strategy should work together, including the physical space but also extending to functions like marketing and HR.