Branded With Purpose
How deep and purposeful can brand experience be in the workplace? M Moser designed around people and brand culture, rather than just operations, for Diageo’s refreshed Singapore office. And the result has been transformative.
Diageo is a global leader in beverage alcohol and holds some of the world’s best-known beverage labels. The very prominence of its constituent brands raises the distinct challenge of how to represent the parent company as a whole. In a Diageo workplace, brand representation and connection is important not only for its employees but also for the many stakeholders who will be invited into the office for learning and engagement opportunities.
Combine that challenge with the fact that Diageo recently introduced transformative global human resources and workplace initiatives, and one arrives at a complex but potential-laden brief for the designers of the company’s workplaces. In the case of Diageo’s One George Street Singapore office location, which houses employees overseeing the wider Asia Pacific region, the choice of experienced workplace design specialist M Moser proved particularly valuable, but not solely because of the studio’s workplace-sector intelligence.
Addy Walcott, the Hong Kong-based leader of M Moser’s Brand Experience team, has experience in both interior design and branding. He and his team see the need for more compelling and engaging solutions for today’s workplaces, which are mobile, digitised, and often occupied by people on a far more temporary basis. The team’s pivotal insight in the conceptualisation of Diageo’s Singapore workplace was to study not the individual characteristics of the house brands, but their common attributes – via where the brands are experienced by customers.
“That’s in three key areas: in store, in F&B environments, and at home,” explains Walcott. Hence, in the generously proportioned front-of-house area of the office, the worker or visitor encounters a sequence of spaces: a retail-inspired display at the office entrance dubbed The Store; a variety of gathering spaces including a kitchen, collectively known as The Living Room; and The Bar, the centrepiece feature which not only provides a natural setting to showcase Diageo’s collection of brands but also doubles up as a work and event space.
This focus on the experience of familiar environments, rather than the physical product, brings to life Diageo’s tagline, ‘Celebrating
Life, Everyday, Everywhere’. In the back-of-house area, the narrative continues with The Studio (the main workspace with a mix of shared benches and desks, lounges and collaboration settings) and The Study (for quieter work and reflection). With the change in the Singapore office to unassigned seating and the removal of traditional individual workstations, Diageo has managed to significantly reduce its lease area. Another significant change was the proportion of space in the front of house and back of house; the proportion of frontof-house space has almost tripled from the original layout.
Diageo’s transformative efforts included a push for staff to build meaningful connections with each other and with its brands, and were premised on a drive to ‘inspire and connect’. The creation of a supportive and open work space where everyone feels included and is empowered to perform at their best was hence central. M Moser created a new workplace environment that supports this through its provision of a vast array of settings in which to meet intuitively and collaborate. “We’ve given maximum choice in the types of spaces people can work in,” says Walcott, “depending on what they need to do and also, more importantly, their own individual personality. Now, people will meet in The Bar or in a booth in The Living Room rather than necessarily in a traditional meeting room. So there’s more natural, and less forced human interaction.”
He adds, “Once you think about communicating a brand and the emotions and culture of an organisation, something deeper happens: you design around people. If you design around operations and functions, then you can only design around furniture.” Feedback from staff about the workplace, he says, has focused positively on a new sense of openness and camaraderie among people, and on a sense of pride about the space. Says Diageo’s APAC Head of Talent Engagement, Leesa Rawlings, “Our unique, flexible work space has really allowed our employees to untether and express themselves freely in a way that fosters creativity at the workplace and at the same time reinforces an inclusive culture which values diversity and inclusion.”
Diageo Singapore demonstrates the extent to which today’s workplaces extend in purpose far beyond operational work. This is a human-centric place to learn, engage and build connections. “A lot of traditional formatted spaces for offices will be less relevant moving forward,” suggests Walcott, adding: “At M Moser, we believe that workplace design is at the cutting edge of interior design now, because it’s learning from many different disciplines – hospitality, residential, retail – and bringing all that into a very exciting new world of working. The next wave of evolution in the workplace environment will understand the importance of human comfort, and be able to communicate brand with purpose. I think we have a space that already looks to the future.”