How to Bring Your Brand to Life When Creating a Workplace Environment

Here at Carson Design Associates, we have seen that organizations big and small are beginning to understand the importance of culture and physical experience of your workplace environment.

Your workplace environment is now far more than walls, desks and computers. Instead, it serves as a second home for some employees, a recruitment tool for hiring and retaining top talent and, most importantly, a place to inspire your team. Bringing your brand to life in your physical work environment plays a huge part in motivating (or demotivating) people to work hard in shaping and growing your brand.

Designing this motivating workplace environment involves determining your company culture and offering an authentic brand experience for your employees. After all, the experiences your team has with your brand internally dictate how your brand is perceived externally.

Bringing Your Brand to Life

Like any good branding campaign, your internal branding goal should be to create an emotional connection to your company. Design should play a huge role in making these connections. Be intentional about the day-to-day interactions that influence the way people experience their workplace. Not sure where to start? Here’s a look at three ways to get started bringing your brand to life when creating a workplace environment.

Define Your Brand

Take some time defining the experience someone has with your company. Think beyond logos and colors to the values that permeate your organization. Every single person who comes into contact with your company — employees, job applicants, customers — has the power to influence your brand perception, but it all starts with you setting the tone.

Reflect Your Core Values

Once you have your core brand values determined, it’s important to live these out internally. Your values should lead decision making and dictate how you interact with everyone coming into contact with your brand. This proves to the entire company that you genuinely believe the values you promote. Continue to authentically live out your brand values and reinforce them in every thing you do in the office. Here are a few ideas of how to incorporate your brand values in your workplace:

Collaborative spaces where informal interactions between employees can take place to make everyone feel more comfortable contributing, sharing opinions and developing new ideas.
Breakout areas with various types of seating to encourage people to step away from their desks and give them mobility throughout the office.
Private spaces where team members can get away, work silently, meditate, and maybe even take a quick nap.
If one of your brand values is sustainability, ensure that you’ve done everything you can to have a green office and show to your employees that you genuinely care about the environment.

Incorporate Design Features Meaningfully

Be intentional about the look and feel of your office space. When someone steps into your workplace, does it send a cohesive brand message? Does it inspire employees without feeling overbearing? Focus on the details:

1. Share your brand’s story.

Use photos, art, decor, and maybe an actual timeline to highlight where your organization has been, what it does, and where it’s going.

2. Visually bring your brand into your space.

Creative signage is an easy way to link design to your brand’s look and feel, while adding personality to the office.

3. Highlight your customers.

Tell success stories throughout the office to not only inspire your team, but impress guests when they visit. Start by framing photographs and testimonials of your customers and putting them around the office or creating one centralized wall of stories.

4. Use technology.

From interactive experiences with your brand to digital displays that showcase projects to projectors playing videos on a blank wall, don’t be afraid to embrace technology and use it to represent your brand in innovative ways around the office.

Your internal audiences are just as important to your external markets. By bringing your brand to life in your office environment, you remind employees what the brand is trying to achieve, thereby creating brand ambassadors internally. The story you tell internally is what ultimately gets told externally.

A well-branded workplace is a daily reminder for your team and visitors to the office of what you do and what you stand for. Be intentional about the design so you can make a lasting impression on anyone who comes into contact with your brand.

Branding in Carson Design Projects

Here’s a quick look at some past Carson Design projects in which we worked with our clients to incorporate a cohesive brand within our interior designs:

Accenture

In their Dallas, Texas office, the Accenture brand goes far beyond a logo that greets guests at the reception desk. The Accenture mark and bold-colored imagery flows throughout all six floors of the 155,000 square foot space and builds on the collaborative community the workplace design embodies.