Boost Return to Office With Brand-Led Office Design

What’s an office for?

Employers need to express and deliver a compelling answer to this question if they have any hope of succeeding in the push to R.T.O. (Return to Office). In the wake of the Great Resignation, employment has become consumerized and many employees need to be convinced to R.T.O.

To try to lure employees back to the office, some employers have turned to amenities and activities (e.g., The New York Times reports that Qualcomm offers weekly events such as pop-up snack stands on ‘Take a Break Tuesday’ and group fitness classes for ‘Wellness Wednesday'”) -- with varying degrees of success. Others have simply mandated employees return and have risked alienating – and ultimately losing -- them. But there’s another, better way to fuel R.T.O.

Infusing your office design with your brand is an effective way to turn your office into a magnet, inspiration, and guide for employees. In fact, brand-led office design can boost employee perceptions that the office is not simply an attractive option but actually a vital element of their work experience.

Not Your Typical Hipster Office

Designing an office that addresses employee needs and expectations today is not only about incorporating trendy design elements like open floor plans and modular workspaces and clever features such as phone booths and Zoom rooms. Recent developments in office design like these may be smart and much-needed improvements on old designs that no longer fit our modern ways of working. But many of them are generic solutions, while you really need considered designs that address the unique culture, values, and working style of your company.

The folks at office furniture maker Gebesa advise companies to use office design as a means for reinforcing their specific desired culture.  “Although the open office layout is growing in popularity,” they say, “it does not fit all businesses. For instance, a security-based company that hinges on privacy and confidentiality will require more enclosed working areas than open spaces. The layout therefore must be customized to the precise needs of the organization.”

To offer further examples they explain, “Enclosed individual working spaces with high barriers in form of cubicles that do not allow direct communication with other employees depict and promote a control culture in an office. With this design, the focus is on doing things right.” Whereas, they continue, “An office design with group working areas and fewer individual spaces on the other hand demonstrates a collaborative culture in an organization. The outcome of such a less formal setting is long-lasting workforce development and enhanced teamwork.”

Brand-Driven Design

Your office design should express your uniqueness as a brand. It should be salient and differentiating. 

Your brand’s role in the design of your office is not only to make an impression on customers who may visit your office. The foundational elements of your brand – your purpose and core values – should be used in office design to influence your employees. Brand-led office design is not standard practice – but it should be.

Tamara Romeo, “Design Boss” Founder & CEO of San Diego Office Design, observes, “Careful consideration of a company's core values; mission, vision and culture is a rare first step in planning for office design or office reconfiguration." She recommends you start the design process by considering these values and whether they might need to be refreshed in light of all that has changed in the past couple of years. And then, you need to do the hard work of narrowing down the exhaustive list of keywords, phrases, and ideas into a few concepts that can be translated into the driving design principles for your office.

Making a personal emotional connection (a “PEC”) is a core value of the Zappos brand and culture. So, when the company had the opportunity to design its office space from the ground up, it brought to life the PEC concept for employees in many ways. It incorporated signage and décor that celebrates the diversity and connection among employees, and it installed a PEC station where employees found the space and supplies to create and mail handwritten thank you notes to make a personal connection with customers.

LinkedIn designed its Omaha, Nebraska, office to embody the company’s mission -- "to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful." The design replaces a rigid one-size-fits-all seating strategy with non-assigned, team-based "neighborhoods" and new space types meant to support a variety of work settings -- from spaces that support individual focus and privacy to spaces that support small-group collaboration and brainstorming. 

An Employee Engagement Effort

Driving your office design with your brand helps to engage and equip your employees. Infusing your brand values into employees’ daily environment not only keeps those values top of mind -- but more importantly, it reinforces how central they are to your organization and enables employees to experience how powerful and valuable they are.

When the leaders at Microsoft wanted to transform the organization into a unified and formidable player in emerging technologies, they knew they needed to bridge the silos and overcome the competition between divided product groups that had characterized the company’s culture and hindered innovation in the past. So, they designed their offices to promote collaboration and alignment.  

The company’s Silicon Valley campus incorporates a central courtyard to encourage social connection through direct interaction.  As any one team looks out through large glass windows onto the courtyard that it shares with three other teams, they are subtly but powerfully influenced to appreciate the value of those other teams and to explore new places and possibilities for inspiration. Kyle Elliott, a partner at WRNS, the design firm that helped bring Microsoft’s SVC vision to life, explains the design approach, saying, “Teams are both visually and physically connected to each other.”

At Airbnb, the company designed its headquarters to promote a sense of belonging – the core of the company’s mission. In particular, it wanted its employees to feel a sense of comradery and affinity with its hosts, the people who open their homes to guests. To do so, it designed conference rooms to match actual host properties and lined the hallways with giant portraits of hosts. That way, employees are encouraged on a daily basis to consider the key role that hosts play in the company’s operations and value proposition.

A Purposeful Office

The push to R.T.O. and hybrid work presents the opportunity to re-consider the viability and vitality office design contributes to your organization. 

After all, your goal is not simply to get employees to come back to the office. It is to ensure that they are excited to be there, engaged with their work and with each other, and equipped to build your brand regardless of their role. As such, your brand should be an influential factor in designing your office.

Brand-led office design requires focus and discipline. Romeo says, “Adding new furnishings and paint schemes and calling it 'designed' is simple and common, but knowing how to apply design as a solution and an amplification to your culture is truly an art.” She advises to “take the deep dive into your brand that is needed to uncover the hidden subtext needed to produce valuable ROI."

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This article is part of the Brand+Culture Series. Subscribe to the series (use the button at the top of the page) to be notified whenever new articles are added.

And check out these related resources:

• What Happened When Airbnb Blew Up Its HR Department To Focus On "Employee Experience"
• Brand Experience Brief video of Zappos Corporate Office
• Engaging Employees Starts with Remembering What Your Company Stands For

#RTO #ReturnToOffice #HybridWork #OfficeDesign #EmployeeExperience #EmployeeEngagement