CAN RETAIL STRATEGY MAKE US LOVE THE OFFICE?
What do we really mean when we speak of ‘experience’ and ‘engagement’ at work? What part do the emotions play in our performance at work? Can workplace design learn from retail to crack the code of peak performance? FITCH says yes.
It can be vexing to consider where our personal relationship with and expression of brands begins and ends. We are increasingly favouring the lived over the material. And as brands have recognised that, many of our experiences of community, learning and play have become intertwined with brand identities.
At work, we have always – to a point – lived the brand of our employer. Although workspaces too often fail to embody a meaningful expression of brand in their design, the employee has always been required to project alignment with brand values. But how could the employee be encouraged to really feel that alignment as they do with their favourite clothing, technology or sports brands? And could a deeper alignment result in better performance at work? In an era when the engagement of employees is paramount, it’s a question well worth asking.
“The next wave of workplace design should be the antithesis of corporate,” says Simon Bell, Managing Director, Southeast
Asia, at FITCH. Bell has spent the majority of his professional career in branding, but recently his attention has been turning to workplace strategy. He was a rare breed on the stage of the WORKTECH Singapore 2019 conference (as he acknowledged) – something of an outsider among speakers from the corporate world as well as designers who regularly serve it. But he delivered a refreshing mandate.
“A lot of the concepts of retail are starting to apply to workplace,” he said. “Retail is really starting to engage people before they even get to the physical site. Then it’s about how they bring people through the space, and how they re-engage them again offline as well. The physical retail spaces that consumers love and connect to are very much device-driven at the moment. But along the way there are memorable human interactions.”
Similar thinking about engagement could invigorate our experience of the workplace, he suggested, which continues to subscribe doggedly to the belief that simply placing a ping-pong table or a fussball table in the office will create ‘experience’. “How do we take the customer through the space – the customer being the employee – and how do we engage them along the way? How do we bring them on a journey? And how do we allow them to work differently and be different within the workspace?” he asks.
Bell’s team at FITCH is “starting to work toward the idea of the workspace as the flagship of the company” – a space of deep engagement and human interaction through meaningful experience. “There are a number of reasons why we’re thinking this way,” he explained at WORKTECH. “Firstly, we see that there are fading barriers between the professional and the personal,” he said, with work being done anywhere – not just in the office. Hence, the oftheard question of what will entice people back to the workspace?
Secondly, Bell cited the preciousness of talent as a resource. He spoke of the conflicting characteristics of the new generation – deep engagement with issues such as #metoo fused with a state of constant partial attention. He also referred to the engagement potential of glimpses ‘behind the scenes’ – a strategy that has proven successful in the retail sphere. In the workplace, activities such as hackathons have immense potential to allow employees to feel the rhythm of the workforce and the energy that’s fuelling it. “Behind the scenes is the new scene,” he said.
“Employees are the brand experience,” he added. “It’s in the way they put themselves across, the way they interact, and the way departments talk to each other as well. How do we design for that?” It comes down to encouraging a ‘purpose mindset’, he suggests. What’s the purpose of the institution or brand? What’s the purpose of the employee? FITCH’s strategy is to to increase the sense of ‘belongingness’ and the idea of self-actualisation for the employee. “Create an employee experience that allows individual purpose, but also collective culture about who the brand is and the behaviours we want as an organisation,” said Bell.
FITCH proposes an ‘omnichannel’ way of looking at things – borrowing a strategy from the retail world – via a broad series of touchpoints across physical, human and digital experiences. Bell spoke of a diverse list of experience types at WORKTECH, including campfire, lab, playground, retreat, arena and others. These would be matched to specific zones in the workplace to underpin both required function and desires for employee experience. FITCH also proposes the use of data about brands to map the most ideal experiences in the workplace in line with brand culture.
“How can we give people a truly immersive experience when they walk into their workspace, in the same way that retail does?” asked Bell. “When you walk into retail, you’re walking into the brand.”
For FITCH, the strategy is to map people’s needs through specific experiences at work, consider how to deliver a sense of purpose, and translate these findings back to the brand attributes. Designed in a considered way, an experience of the workplace can unlock employee potential, said Bell, but it’s crucial to understand employees’ emotional needs.
Perhaps we can love the workplace after all.