How Your Brand and Experiential Design Can Impact Your Office Design - with Sonya Simmonds, Spotify

Sonya Simmonds joins Kursty to discuss how to meaningfully bring out your brand through workplace and office design. They explore how office design impacts employee morale, productivity, and work ethic, why the ‘wow factor’ of designing office spaces shouldn’t stop at gimmicks and fragmented Instagramable spots, and Spotify’s Work From Anywhere program that allows staff to choose between a ‘home mix’ and an ‘office mix’ work experience.

Sonya Simmonds is an interior architect with 20 years of experience and the Head of Workplace Innovation & Design at Spotify. 

“It’s also really strange to me that people say 'I don’t care what it’s like. I really don’t care what the office is like or this building is like' and I’m thinking, well you’re going to spend a lot of time in it.”

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Timestamps

[00:25] Episode overview: designing spaces, designing for brand cultures, co-creation, working from anywhere, and more…
[01:46] Who is Sonya Simmonds?
[03:33] Visiting the Nike store in New York and Working at Bloomberg in London (experiential design).
[10:51] How big is Spotify? How many offices does Spotify have? 
[12:24] How do you choose an office building and how do you use co-creation to localize it?
[15:55] Flexibility, wellbeing, and working from anywhere - how they affect workplace design 
[22:24] Home mix vs. office mix: planning based on people’s preferences
[24:19] Storytelling and communicating design updates with the whole team (how and why to make people care about design decisions).
[29:38] How office design brings out the brand (and a deep dive into Spotify’s Heart and Soul room)
[40:09] Instagrammable office spaces and office spaces that employees actually love being in

4 Key Takeaways

1. One way to localise an office building is to invite local artists and local staff to co-create the look and feel of it with you. You should also ask members of the local office what they want to define what they wanted to express with the office. 
2. Explaining your design choices to the wider body of employees can help the whole team understand why design decisions are made the way they’re made. For example, if you chose not to occupy a building in an area that displaces the local population - this strengthens your brand values and shows staff that you are serious about your convictions.  It also helps the team become more proud of the offices they inhabit. 
3. The migration back to the office is intimidating and stressful. Your workplace design can help people ease that stress. 
4. Bringing your brand out in the design of your workplace isn't about purely aesthetic elements or fun gimmicks, the brand has to be deeply embedded in the functionality of the space as well. 

Links 

Connect with Sonya Simmonds: LinkedIn 

Connect with Kursty Groves: LinkedIn | Twitter | Ask a question or pitch an idea:

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Spatial Attraction is written, produced, and hosted by Kursty Groves.

Original music and sound production by Lee Golledge.

For episodes and updates, visit https://kurstygroves.com/podcast/ - and follow Spatial Attraction on LinkedIn and Instagram.

To suggest a theme or guest, email jen@spatial-attraction-podcast.com.