Why You Need to Bring Your Brand to Life

People aren’t seeking places to work; they’re seeking places to form meaningful connections. Following years of COVID-19-induced isolation, workers are craving in-person connections. Connections with each other, with their employers, with the brands they buy from, and with the brands, they work for.

Studies reveal that 45% of workers missed social connections the most during the two years of the pandemic. 35% of workers missed collaborating with others, while 65% of remote employees confessed to feeling lonely when working outside of the office.????

Not only that, but the pandemic has also dramatically shifted work priorities. Employees are now hyper-focused on the values of the company they work for and want to know what that company stands for. 44% of the workforce expect to work in places that are respectful of the Earth’s resources, up from 38% just the year before, and 51% of consumers expect brands to publicly announce actions they're taking to be more diverse and inclusive. Furthermore, 27% of workers said they would leave a company that does not share their same values.

Ultimately, people expect employers to be a part of something greater, to serve a higher purpose, and to do something that brings about change in the world. Which means, companies are hungry to get their workers back into the office have one option: establish a 'north star' or the promise their brand makes to its employees, customers, and the world at large, and develop an office space that physically aligns with and delivers on that promise.

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Why Office Branding is Especially Important Now

Standing for something is one thing, but employees need to see a company’s commitment to achieving it. This is where office branding becomes so important. Bringing your brand and its values to life within the workplace serves two very important functions.

The first is it allows employees and guests to experience your brand and brand promises in three dimensions. Employees want to be engaged daily with a company’s core values, and there’s no better way to display these than in the design of your office space. The more they're able to engage and understand a brand, the more connected they will feel to it on a deeper level. ?Employees and guests should also have a similar experience across your office fleet; for corporations with multiple locations, it’s important your brand is expressed consistently in the physical environment.?Creating and documenting your brand standards is critical to maintaining consistency.?

In turn, the branding of your office serves a second and supplemental benefit of giving your employees a reason to be back in the office. As we mentioned above, employees want to go to the office to connect. Office branding has the effect of giving workers a shared sense of identity, a united sense of place, belonging, and community. By being in a branded office, workers know they will have more opportunities to connect with other like-minded people to form and strengthen meaningful relationships, as opposed to the transactional ones they may find in a generic workplace.

As a result, once you master how your brand translates into space, you’ll be able to naturally woo your employees back to the office.

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How to Translate Your Brand into a Space

How exactly, then, do you go about translating your brand into a physical space? While incorporating your brand colors and typography is a great start, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Beyond that, these are the three go-to methods you can use.

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Social Engineer Experiences Through Space

The first is configuring your space to social engineer desired experiences. In the same way, a dining hall on a college campus is designed to encourage students to connect with one another, there are ways to design your own space to forge experiences that are unique to your brand.

For example, by incorporating more multi-purpose rooms into your office, you’re able to foster increased collaboration among employees. By removing distractions like TVs and phone charging stations and replacing them with card games and art in the lunch and eating areas, you’re able to facilitate a more collaborative and inclusive environment.

Similarly, space configured to house diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programming communicates a brand that is committed to promoting equality within the workplace. In the same way, by including technology within the office that bridges the gap between remote and in-person employees, you send employees the message that everyone deserves to be present, even if they can’t physically be there.

It’s important to understand what specific experiences you want to cultivate and then reverse engineer the type of space needed to make it happen.

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Engage all the Senses

The second method you can use to translate your brand into the workspace is to transmute it in a way that engages all five senses.

Branding an office goes beyond the use of the right colors and visual aesthetics. When clients work with us, we help them push the boundaries even further and really think about what their brand would smell, sound, feel, and even taste like.

A trend we’re seeing carry over very well into the office from retail and hospitality is the creation of a signature scent. Smells have a powerful effect of triggering strong emotions and inducing people to either relax, feel more engaged or feel more creative.

In terms of touch, taking the time to select office furniture that tactilely aligns with a company’s brand is also another approach. So, if your desired brand experience is to encourage creativity and out-of-the-box thinking, the traditional office desk and chair are not good elements to use in the design of your office.

Engaging one or more senses within a space is important because a growing body of research shows this triggering small emotions within people, and strong, positive emotional experiences lead to deeper feelings of connection and belonging.

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Dimensionalize Your Impact

The third and final approach you can take to translate your brand into your space is to dimensionalize your company’s impact within the space. What this looks like will greatly depend on a company’s specific core values and goals. A company committed to sustainability, like JLL, can bring that commitment to life by using sustainable materials in the design of their space, from the selection of materials all the way to furniture.

As another example, if your company’s brand promise is fostering the health and well-being of your employees and clients, then adhering to the WELL Building Standard? is recommended. The WELL Building Standard? is a performance-based system for measuring, certifying, and monitoring the air quality, water, light, comfort, and other features of the built environment that nourish the mind and body of its occupants, something that 59% of all employees now expect their companies to provide.

Overall, it’s important to not only take a stand on how your brand positively benefits society at large but also to make sure the physical space reflects those values and is shared and communicated with your workers.

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Take Your Stand

During the pandemic, people were driven from each other, and now there’s nothing more people crave than to reconnect and reunite with others.

As an employer, you have the opportunity to make your office space the place for these connections to occur by bringing your brand to life in the ways mentioned in this article.

By doing so, you’re not only letting people know who you are and what you stand for, but you’re giving employees the motivation to return to the office so that they can experience a sense of belonging to a higher purpose every day.?

To find out what that could potentially look like for your office, please reach out to me: [email protected].?