Branding your workplace means giving it a unique signature in agreement with your IP and your corporate culture. You want the place to speak its own language and send its own message to everyone who comes to visit, the same as to the people who spend every day in the workplace. A lot of entrepreneurs don’t even realize that the design of their workplace affects both their team and their potential clients. In other words, branding it in just the right way needs to be a top priority. So, here are six tips on how you can do this most efficiently.
Encouragement of brand loyalty
The first thing you achieve through workplace branding is the encouragement of brand loyalty. You see, by surrounding your employees with your company’s logo, colours, and promotional materials, you will create a scenario in which they develop a far stronger sense of belonging. Look at it this way, every sports team has their uniforms and emblems, same as any army or religious group. This is a simple psychological trick that has been used for decades to enhance one’s sense of community. By associating a certain space, colour, and shape with your brand, your staff will have a lot easier job of making people feel at home.
This is also a project that pays itself off. How? Well, brand loyalty is directly connected to the amount of effort that people are going to put into working for you. Other than this, it drastically reduces your talent abandonment rate. Just think about the amount of time and effort that you’ve spent training and drilling your staff only to have them leave once their training is over. This is something that you can easily avoid by simply enhancing brand loyalty. Branding of the workplace is one of the ways to achieve this.
Stronger impression on visitors
Another thing you can achieve by branding the workplace is the idea of leaving a stronger impression on your visitors. This starts early on, which is why you need to start with décor branding as early as the driveway. Outfitting the entrance with a nice welcome mat, that you’ve purchased from an online Mat Shop is just one of your options. Other than this, you can also decorate with signs, banners and many other similar items.
Once they step the foot inside of the building, they’ll find themselves at the reception area. The reception area itself is something that you need to pay special attention to, as well. The receptionist’s desk, the waiting area, and hallways all need to be carefully personalized and branded. Most importantly, you need to figure out the itinerary that a visitor to your company will take. Naturally, you may want to take them through the work area and show them where the magic happens but you also don’t want them to distract your team while working. This is something that you will have to figure out on your own.
Self-promotion
Previously, we’ve talked about your ability to make a strong impression on your visitors and this is just one of the directions that you can take when it comes to the overall decoration of the place. You see, images taken inside of your office can be used for your company’s website. In fact, it’s highly advised that you do this. This is one way to show your audience what’s going on in-house without the distracting effects that we’ve previously discussed. Images made this way can also be used as a poster for a seminar, webinar or any event that your company decides to host later on.
Other than this, it can also be used as a method of boosting your hiring practices. A well-designed workplace is, on its own, a strong incentive for people to consider working for you. For this to work, you might also want to consider employing some ergonomics inside of the workplace (which is a topic that we’ll discuss shortly). Still, remember that all of these efforts depend on how picturesque it all is. In other words, a skilled professional photographer can be just as important as a great designer. Even if you’re doing it on your own, learning a thing or two about interior design photography can be quite helpful.
Productivity and ergonomics
The productivity of your team is affected by their work environment in more than one way. This is why you need to study the topic of ergonomics. For starters, you need to provide your staff with enough workspace. About 11 square feet are deemed as ideal. If you have too many people to provide everyone with this figure, you might want to consider allowing a part of your staff to telecommute. Allowing flexible work hours is also quite helpful because it gives people a chance to make more room for their coworkers on their own.
Apart from this, you need to think about direct impacts on productivity like the amount of light that your audience has available. Second, you need to think about the impact of colours on the productivity of your employees. The psychology of colours teaches us that people respond differently to different colours. Red makes people alert and aggressive, while yellow helps creatives focus. Depending on the nature of your work, you can paint different areas in different colours. When it comes to branding, this too is something that you should think of when developing your intellectual property.
Avoiding distractions
A crucial reason for improved office design is a chance to minimize workplace distractions by any means necessary. For instance, floor-to-ceiling curtains can make the place a lot quieter and somewhat eliminate audio and visual distractions that are coming from the outside world. A nice cozy rug can be used to create a homelier ambiance in the office and, at the same time, it can be used to muffle the noise of foot traffic. The neatness of your office is at the same time great for productivity and an image of great efficiency, order, and organization. In other words, it’s more than possible to have the best of both worlds.
One other thing that you need to be mindful of is that it’s not just about the visuals. You see, a brand is an idea. It’s the first thing that pops into people’s minds when someone mentions your brand or something manufactured by your brand. This is why it’s so important that you aim for sating all the senses of your staff and your visitors. By eliminating distractions, you will easily handle the majority of negative aspects with ease.
It’s automatic
The best thing about branding the workplace through design lies in the fact that it doesn’t take too much work on your part. You do it all once and then you just go ahead with the regular maintenance (something that you would have to do even without the branding). Once you set up the place the way you want it to, it will perform all the above-listed functions more or less automatically. The impact of optimal illumination, suitable colour, and adequate furniture won’t fade over time. That’s just not how these things work.
So, if you have an option to give your organization a passive boost of any kind, do you really have the privilege of ignoring this opportunity? Once you adopt the mindset that branding goes beyond a corporate logo and learn how to interpret your corporate culture through design, your job will become a lot easier. There are volumes and volumes of resources written on this topic and it might be wise checking some of it out.
In conclusion
All in all, you need to stop looking at workplace branding as merely giving your office a facelift. It’s a marketing investment, an investment in productivity and an investment in managerial logistics of the place. Like any investment, it will take time until it pays itself off. Just bear in mind that, even though you don’t know where the break-even point is, this doesn’t mean that there isn’t one. The ROI is always positive, especially since your initial investment is as modest as it gets.
