The Spaces That Shape Us
Join us as we explore the profound impact of physical spaces on individuals' lives. Through interviews and expert panels, we unveil the secrets of designing spaces that shape emotions, boost productivity, and enhance overall well-being. Discover the latest trends, innovative designs, and strategies for creating inspiring work environments that foster collaboration, engagement, and work-life balance.
The Spaces That Shape Us
How Your Space Tells Your Story with Rose Radtke
Ready to redefine what you know about branding? Join us as we navigate the intriguing universe of physical branding with our guest, Rose Radtke, a passionate brand and community strategist. The journey begins with an intriguing exploration of what a brand truly represents - it's far more than just a logo or a colour scheme. Imagine your office or workspace as a living, breathing embodiment of your brand's core values, broadcasting your ethos not only to your team, but to the world.
Listen in as we uncover the importance of your brand's personality - the unique, intangible vibe that it radiates. Rose guides us through strategies to fortify this persona. Ever thought about using natural elements or the power of scents to help your brand pop? Or the crucial role that language plays in shaping brand perception? We're going to cover all these and more.
Finally, we break down the Curve of Participation and delve into the pivotal role of feedback in evaluating the effectiveness of a branded workspace. Hear Rose emphasise the necessity of adaptability, and discuss the future possibilities of AI spatial planning. And speaking of the future, we explore the ever-growing demand for freelance creatives, and how AI can be a useful tool in this space. So, buckle up, and get ready for a deep dive into what makes a brand tick, and how you can use this knowledge to your advantage.
https://www.roseradtke.co.uk/
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Welcome back to the Spaces that Shape Us. Today's episode dives into an often overlooked aspect of branding the physical spaces we inhabit. This is an area that's very close to my heart, having worked in branding myself, so I'm very excited to introduce this episode today. We're really gonna look into what a brand is and why it's so important, and then how it relates to physical space. Is it just slapping a logo on the wall and painting your space in the colours of your brand, or is it more than that? So I'm very excited to introduce our guest today, rose Radke.
Hollie Sanglier:Rose is a brand and community consultant for ambitious people-first companies. She especially loves working with brands that bring people together in real life. She's passionate about marrying thinking with creativity to help shape the world that she wants her children to grow up in. We've also worked with her several times before. She's actually the mastermind behind the AW Spaces brand. So welcome, I'm so excited to have you here. Thank you, I'm so excited to be here. Wonderful, we've also got Lisa, our head of design. If you listened to previous episodes, you can hear all about Lisa. So welcome, lisa, great to have you back, thank you. So Rose will be giving us an insight into her background what a branded workspace is and why a brand is so important. And then Lisa will be giving us all her insights into interior design and how, from our experience, particularly from the sort of client side AW Spaces we interpret people's brands into their workspace. So let's kick off. Rose, could you give us a bit of a background, what you do in your consultancy and any exciting work you've done recently? Sure?
Rose Radke:as you said, I'm a branding community strategist, so that means my work tends to be grounded in brand strategy, but I often work with people-first businesses, so that's businesses that bring people together, usually in real life, sometimes online as well. So I also create community strategies for a lot of my clients to make sure that actually they're engaging their people in all the right ways, and that can be in their online communities, at their events, and it can also be in their spaces, in their kind of teams and physical environments. I absolutely love what I do. I love people, I love communities. I'm an absolute community junkie. So, yeah, it's really exciting for me to work with these kind of organisations Amazing.
Hollie Sanglier:So just for our listeners, this is probably an easy question for you to answer, but just for anyone who doesn't kind of know and I think there's a lot of misconception about what is a brand, what does that mean?
Rose Radke:A lot of people tend to think that a brand is a logo, or a logo and a colour palette. Actually, really, a brand is more about the feeling that you evoke in your audience, so it's about your purpose, and that might be your mission and vision. It's about your values, it's about the personality that you put across, the personality of your organisation, and, of course, there's the visual brand as well.
Hollie Sanglier:But a brand is so much more than a logo, and why do you think it's so important for companies to invest in branding?
Rose Radke:Because branding brings people together. Your brand is your beacon really. It's a shining light. It shows people that they belong. It's how you attract the right audiences and it's also how you bring your people together, your teams together. You know, I'm sure whenever you've applied for a job you've kind of looked very carefully at what that company stands for, what it's all about. What you've done there is, you've understood the brand. So, yeah, a brand is just so, so foundational to the success of any organisation.
Hollie Sanglier:Yeah, it's so interesting. I feel like people can often invest in it too late, definitely, or not invest in it at all. Yeah.
Rose Radke:Yeah, investing, they kind of often a lot of confusion between branding and marketing. So yeah, of course marketing is important, but you can't do your marketing if you don't have a strong brand. It's just not enough to just kind of put a random message out there. It has to mean something and that's. It has to come from the brand, and the brand is the heart.
Hollie Sanglier:And I guess for leaders or people who own their business, it's quite hard to measure the ROI of a brand. I know that because I'm trying to do it constantly. Yes, and you know, as the marketing director, I constantly have to have. You know, showing my KPIs and the brand part is actually quite difficult unless you're just doing, you know, the same time as we've searched on Google. But it's so much more than that, because it lives within the center of the organization.
Rose Radke:Yeah, a brand is very valuable but you often don't see the value for several years because it's kind of it's an asset a brand's an asset. So until it's been with you for a while it's difficult to kind of measure quite how valuable it is. But at the end of the day it's your reputation, and how valuable is your reputation.
Hollie Sanglier:That's so true. Well, so just to bring it back to physical space, what is to you the concept of a branded workspace?
Rose Radke:So I think when people think of branding a space, they can often think of maybe putting the logo on a window, or they can think of, you know, having the logo displayed around the space, maybe having some branded colors, but actually that's really the icing on the cake. Really, what's important is that your brand strategy, that's your vision and your mission and your values and personality. It's really important that that's the stuff that infuses the space. So you might think of your workspace as a brand touch point, just like your website is or your social channels are. It's a really, really important brand touch point and it's a massive opportunity to reinforce what you stand for with the people that really matter your team, the people that are the ambassadors of your brand. So it's so important to get it right and invest in it, just like you'd invest in any other area.
Hollie Sanglier:Yeah, and I guess it's kind of there's two sides to it. There's spaces where their space is the business, for example co-working spaces or offices that have clients in them all the time and then there is just the kind of the workspace where people work and they might not come in all the time. People might be hybrid or they might have people in one or two days a week, so they might not see that branding that space is important. What would you sort of say to those people?
Rose Radke:So your team is the engine of your business. It's probably your greatest asset. Your team members are your ambassadors. They're the people that really care and they're really gonna sell what you do and push what you do to new levels. So why would they not be your primary audience? They surely are the people that really need to be invested in your brand, that really need to be absolutely immersed in your brand values and what you stand for. I just think it's incredibly important that they are treated as a key audience.
Hollie Sanglier:Hmm, I agree so in terms of the steps that we would take. So, from the beginning, I know at AW Spaces we generally will ask people for their brand guidelines and their brand strategy so that we can get an idea of what they're looking for in their space. And we will hand over to Lisa in a minute, who obviously speaks to our clients about this, and what our experience is in terms of brand. But what would your steps be to start a kind of brand strategy journey with a client for their space?
Rose Radke:So I think what's really important is to understand that your workspace is a touch point. So actually, what's really important in the beginning is going through a standard brand strategy process or not standard, but a solid brand strategy project to make sure that, one, that you've got a brand strategy and, two, that it is really solid, fit for purpose up to date. I guess the first thing to do is a strategic review. I'm looking at whether you know your audience, whether you know your team and what they stand for, what they believe, what their values are. Looking at the landscape, looking at what other people are doing and that applies to the whole brand. But you could also look at other organization spaces as well, kind of looking at trends, what people want and need from their workspace at that given moment. Once you've done that strategic review, once you're very clear on your brand strategy that's your vision, your mission or your purpose, your value, it's your brand essence, even personality of your brand Once that's all set in stone, looking at whether that's reflected in brand guidelines and in your visual brand. So making sure that your visual brand is also reflecting your strategy very strongly. Then making sure you've got brand guidelines and that they include the level of detail that you need to brand a space, because brand guidelines vary wildly. You might just have brand guidelines that detail.
Rose Radke:This is the logo. This is how it should be placed on a page, but actually what you need is this is the logo. This is the area of space it needs around it in different contexts. So, if you're going to put this logo on a wall, this is the area of space it needs around it. You know, if you've got brand with your brand colors making sure you have the right codes for different purposes you know that it's not just for screen, that your colors are going to be used in real spaces, even down to your brand values, if you want them displayed around the space, making sure that they are not too wordy, that you're actually going to be able to use them in print. If that's not the case, then you might need to have variation that you can use in print or on display.
Rose Radke:Then I would make sure and this is really key that you've got the right team in place.
Rose Radke:So, as well as a brand strategist and a visual brand designer, you're definitely going to need your interior designer here, because they're the people that know what is functional, what's going to have longevity in the space, and they're going to need to talk to your brand strategist and your visual brand designer and work with them to make sure that whatever you're putting in place is going to work in the long term, because you don't want to invest in something like this and realise that three months down the line it's looking really shabby, it's really uncomfortable, it's not fit for purpose for people to come together in real life day after day and it's probably quite heavy use. So, yeah, it's just making sure that you've got a really strong team in place and obviously also a project manager that knows what they're doing in terms of translating a brand into a physical space, because it can be quite complex. It's not always completely straightforward. It's not a matter of getting a vinyl made and sticking it up.
Hollie Sanglier:Yeah, I was telling you yesterday that I used to work for a company that really wanted their brand to be injected into the office and we literally had just like a white office with black chairs. It was the most boring place in the world. I'm not going to say who it was and one day they just came in and just stuck our logo on the wall and it literally covered the entire wall and they were like there we go, it's done. Classic, absolutely classic.
Rose Radke:Yeah, I can definitely believe that yeah it's bad.
Hollie Sanglier:Yeah, lisa, over to you. Be you obviously the designer and you have lots of experience with injecting a brand into a space. What's your experience around this? What have we sort of seen recently?
Lisa McLeod:I really like what Rose was talking about in terms of things being fit for purpose, because so many people would say let's take furniture, for example. They may take the furniture out of the budget because they think they can do it themselves. They can go and buy it from an online company. They haven't sat in it and actually, a year down the line, it's broken. And what does that communicate about your brand? It doesn't have longevity. It doesn't say quality, it just says, oh, these people just do half-assed things, things are going to break. And do we want to invest or work with a company like that? That's what these things can, deep down, say to your clients and say to your staff. So that's actually really interesting. So furniture, for example, needs to be commercially viable and have a warranty on it and need to have the right fabrics on it, not just from a visual perspective.
Hollie Sanglier:Do you find that people want their colours injected into a space? We've sort of talked about this recently and generally the answer is kind of no.
Lisa McLeod:Well, it's really hard. There's definitely two schools of thought. Some people I'd say 40% of our clients probably do want to have some sort of brand as they deem it in their space. Whether you know, say, a client's got a very strong lime green colour. Lime green has definitely not been the colour of the moment lately. I mean it's coming a little bit in. But having a lime green office plastered everywhere, it's not very intelligent. It doesn't really say to your staff who you are. It's just saying, oh, this is the colour we are. That's all it's saying.
Lisa McLeod:It's quite basic to do that in a very in-your-face way, but I think what we have been doing in circumstances like that is we drive the client slightly away from that very obvious mindset and to say, okay, why don't we take shades of your colour or bring it in in plants, you know, or bring it in in the fabrics, like things that you can change over time, so you don't get a board of space and a space isn't just saying it's not communicating the wrong message.
Lisa McLeod:So what clients also should be aware of is, through help from an interior designer is that space should feel it could be a feeling of your brand. It doesn't need to be oh, this is our colour, this is our brand. It could be the feeling of your brand. So it could be that one of your values is calmness I don't know, that's probably a poor example, but calmness to say and even if you create a really calm space, that's automatically doing something with your brand in bringing your brand essence into your environment and that will really resonate with your staff. Your staff are going to feel like that you've understood them. If they feel a space is really representing them and everything they stand for and they've brought into your brand, it represents them and it speaks outwardly to your clients as well. So it doesn't just need to be in the colours and the logo on the wall. It can be in everything it could be in using natural materials in a space that gives a sense of calm, or personality brand.
Rose Radke:Personality is what. Calm would be a really good personality attribute to bring into a space. I think.
Lisa McLeod:So that forms part of the brand.
Rose Radke:Yeah, yeah, it's a slightly different brand value, brand personality, but I think bringing brand personality into a space is absolutely vital. Your values might just be on your wall, but your personality is probably going to influence the whole look and feel of the space.
Lisa McLeod:That's interesting. Maybe it's about the terminology we use as well, making clients more aware and being more intelligent ourselves. Brand personality is not something I've actually ever I've probably spoken about it without knowing but to consciously call it personality.
Lisa McLeod:That's really interesting, because how do you set your house up If you're lucky enough to be able to buy a house, and you're decorating it and you're injecting your personality into that. So when people come into your space, they get you and they get what you're about and it's working for your family. It's the exact same principle, really. You're walking into your office space and it should immediately communicate your personality. I think it's nice.
Rose Radke:Yeah, so I've been working with a client recently and they have a very strong community, very big community in Brighton, and we've done a rebrand and a new community strategy and they're now kind of revealing that at some of their events. And recently they revealed it to one of their biggest kind of audience groups and actually some of the feedback was, instead of a brand personality, I called it a vibe because it just felt more right for them. I just I really believe that you don't have to use like standard terminology anymore. It's just not necessary in branding. Well, I'm just a bit of a maverick anyway. But so, yeah, instead of a personality, I created brand vibe and it went down really well.
Rose Radke:Just that changing a word was really powerful and someone came up to the client at the end and just said I absolutely love it. I've never, ever seen a brand use have a vibe before. It's so interesting that you've got a vibe and you've got it just right. That is the vibe. You can't wait to see how else you're going to roll that out. And I thought, yeah, that's. It's very important to use the right terminology, isn't it? Because it can change everything. It can really change the way someone takes that information and then treats it.
Lisa McLeod:Vibes are really interesting word. It's because it's not, it's not a personality, it's almost like a feeling. You get something you can't touch on and just explain yeah, but it's just right, you just know it's right.
Rose Radke:And these guys, they do loads of events. That's like one of their main kind of things. What I wanted to help them achieve was a brand vibe at each and every event so that anyone that was coming to those events would absolutely know that it was this particular organization that was hosting, because sometimes it's not really clear because they have speakers and they have, you know, difficult sort of leading on different sections and stuff like that. So one of the objectives was to make it very, very clear that it was them, and we even thought about, you know, getting stuff like a scent as people come in. Yeah, what is that scent? Why? Why is it that? And that evokes a huge amount of emotion, doesn't it Exactly. So every single time you come to one of this organization's events, you immediately smell the same thing as you go in.
Lisa McLeod:That's so interesting.
Rose Radke:We haven't tried it yet, but I'm really excited to see how this goes because I reckon it could make a massive difference, because scent's so important.
Lisa McLeod:And it really evokes, without even thinking about it. It's very subliminal, isn't it? And your senses are so important to bring into space as well. And the scent I love that.
Rose Radke:Yeah, it's really important. Another of my clients I don't know whether we're allowed to mention client names, but I'm just not going to just in case but another of my clients. Every time I go into their bathroom I absolutely love the smell of their bathroom. The bathroom is a co-working space. It's so significant and like it really gives me the feeling of this specific co-working space. It almost makes me feel at home. But I don't know what the scent is. I've never actually worked out like I can't equate it to anything else, but it's just really important to my experience of that brand and what is that like?
Lisa McLeod:the tiny touches like that that someone's even thought of, that just speaks volumes. You know, if you were anybody off the street walking into this space and going and having that experience you've just had in that space, they'd have such fond memories of that place and be thinking right, even if their hand soap smells nice, it must be a really good quality space and they must know what they're doing and they've thought about everything, yeah, and it's always the same, it's predictable, it's like, and it's very them.
Rose Radke:You know, you haven't just gone to the supermarket and just grabbed the first one, you can say you've made a decision that this is right for the brand so interesting and I guess that idea of sort of someone feeling at home, that's what you'd want your employees to feel like right.
Hollie Sanglier:Definitely so. They feel comfortable in a space and they feel comfortable coming to work. Particularly now, where people are working from home and at work, you don't want them to feel nervous to come in. It should sort of resonate with being at home, right, yeah, 100%. So, in terms of investing in a brand, if you were on a smaller budget or you weren't sure where to start, where should you invest first?
Rose Radke:So, I definitely would think first about how you can help your team to live your brand values every day. So I wouldn't start with getting a big visual brand. If I was on a budget. I would think more about, say, one of your values is creativity, for example. How can you help your team to live that value every day? What can you put in that space to spark their creativity? Can you create special areas where you can they feel really comfortable, where they can break out spaces? Can you kind of use different colors that are going to spark that creativity? Maybe that's shades that if you were in brand colors in clever ways?
Rose Radke:I think helping sustainability is a massive one. How can you help your team live more sustainably each day and then make a big deal of it? So you might invest in some sort of branded signage and stuff like that. But I think start with the values, start with thinking about how you can help your team to live those values. Then I would invest in the vibe lighting, soft furnishings, anything kind of playful or that say calm. Going back to calm, say that's one of your personality traits. How can you bring that calm feeling into that space? Is it softer lighting, is it really nice cushions, or do you want to give? Have a stack of hot water bottles, or like blankets or something for when the weather's a bit colder.
Rose Radke:Yeah, do you want some nice fluffy sheepskins or something like that? So thinking about the vibe, I think, is hugely, hugely important. I would then look at displaying your brand essence or your values, rather than just your logo. I think that's more important. So how can you make more of those values and make more of your brand strategy in the space? Because there are lots of ways to do that in signage and little leaflets and all kind of little takeaways that you might have in your reception area or in your breakup spaces. And then I would think about the visuals.
Rose Radke:So using your color palette in clever ways. You don't have to have every wall splashed with your colors. It can just be like your cups could be in your color palette or, as Lisa says, you could bring it in in plants and really nice, more subtle ways of bringing your colors in that aren't necessarily hugely expensive. I think a lot of budget often goes on having custom-made vinyl and that's really expensive, and banners and you know all of those kind of big budget that actually really low impact stuff that people think of when they think of branding space. Of course, if you've got the budget to do that, great, but I think that should come way down the list, really, in my opinion.
Lisa McLeod:I think in that scenario, less can also be more, I think, having lots of time, people try and do it if we take these vinyl graphics as an example, and they try and put so much information on them.
Lisa McLeod:And ultimately it's just a wash of information and you just look at it and think there's so many words, what is this? And you know, maybe it's just one subtle word, or maybe it's even just taking the color of your word. You know, maybe you always use purple in the word movement and then you can just use purple and that will hopefully resonate with your staff, that that means movement. Or it could be to do as Rose says in terms of the signage. You know, directing yourself around a space, that can be with color. It doesn't need to be, oh, come, this way for the kitchen, it could just be following a line on the floor or a carpet color. So you know you're in the right space. Maybe all your meeting rooms are always blue and you know you're in that space when you're in the blue room. You know, maybe these things mean there's lots of ways, psychologically, that you can showcase your space to people without being very obvious and putting your graphics or your imagery all over the walls.
Rose Radke:Yeah, definitely. The other thing that I think is important is to think about your brand as a living, breathing thing, like a being almost, because it will change. Your company will grow, your team will grow and or shrink. It will just change like anything else, and actually if you've invested a lot into immovable graphics, then that can be really frustrating and it can actually cause quite a lot of resistance to change in your organization, because the moment you change, you then have so much work to do. You have to redecorate an entire office space because you've got all of this kind of stuff slapped everywhere.
Hollie Sanglier:How often do you think that people should revisit their values?
Rose Radke:Minimum every three years, I think. Probably it depends how much work you've done on them in the first place. If you've gone through a proper process, the lifespan of a brand should be three to five years really. So, yeah, you want to be revisiting fairly regularly because the world changes, your team changes, everything changes, trends, move on and update, and you don't want a trend driven brand. Obviously, that's the last thing you want. You want to have longevity in mind, but you definitely need to sort of leave space to review and regroup.
Rose Radke:It might be that you can project stuff onto a wall Sometimes a really nice way of being able to make something a bit more dynamic projecting words onto a wall that you can then update regularly.
Rose Radke:One thing that I did with a client recently or I've done a few times actually is I helped a client set their North Star goal at the beginning of the year we're going to be revisiting that next year and they actually ended up coming up with three words to guide them as a team through the year.
Rose Radke:Periodically, through the year, we've regrouped and made sure that we're on track and that those feel like they are still meaningful and that we're moving towards them. Their words were actually clarity, growth and peace and everything that they've been doing through the year. They've been trying to achieve that North Star goal that is guided by those three words and they've got those words up on their wall. And if you project something like that onto the wall, then it's really easy to change. People stop seeing words, stop seeing brand elements fairly quickly. If there's an opportunity to change them, if they're on screen rather than painted on a wall, or projected onto a wall rather than on vinyl, then you can change them. Then you can keep them up-to-date and dynamic and lively and people won't become blind to them so easily.
Hollie Sanglier:So true, people get blind so quickly, don't they? Even with values and brand and things like that, it just becomes kind of a vibe.
Rose Radke:Yeah, and that's good in a way, but you do want to keep reminding people and you need to kind of put those. It's really important that a brand strategy never, ever, is a document sitting on a server somewhere, because then it means nothing, it just gets lost. That brand strategy needs to come through in every day and needs to be really kind of revisited and thought about and injected into everyday life in different ways. That's why, actually, I started doing community strategy and I spent a year or so really getting very, very deep into that side of things because I realised that I could do all the brand strategy I wanted. I could spend hours and put all my energy into creating these brand strategies but actually if people lost interest, if there was no engagement strategy to back that up, then it was all quite meaningless. So community strategy and engagement strategy audience engagement kind of helps to put that brand strategy into process.
Hollie Sanglier:What are some of the steps you would take to Well, so if you were going to try and push your values every day, what are some of the daily things that you would recommend that people do?
Rose Radke:Actually we're moving kind of into community strategy here and curve of participation. Have you heard about participation curves?
Hollie Sanglier:No.
Rose Radke:Very interesting.
Rose Radke:It was a concept developed by the AirBnBs engagement lead I think he was Douglas Atkins and there was a point in time when Airbnb's whole model was under threat because of some legislation that was being pushed through and they really needed to engage their audience to overturn this legislation in order or change it in order to save Airbnb's whole model.
Rose Radke:So this very clever guy developed a Curve of Participation and it's basically based on the concept that you can ask someone to do something small.
Rose Radke:If you give them a very small ask, they're likely to action that, and then they're likely to do something a little bit bigger next time you ask.
Rose Radke:So if you map out engagement activities on a curve and start with very, very small asks, like read this blog post or respond to this poll, and then those asks get bigger and bigger as time goes on, and actually, once they've been part of that community for a while and they have completed several kind of smaller asks, they're much more likely then to become ambassadors or advocates and very heavily involved, and the same goes for brand engagement. If you want people to engage in your values day to day, it might be that you start by just asking them which one of your values they're identifying most with that week and why. Or you might ask them to read a blog post or a post on Slack and respond to that, and then you might ask them to speak an event a year down the line and demonstrate to an audience how your organisation is living your values. Does that answer your question? I feel like it's gone down a really really random route.
Hollie Sanglier:Sorry, it's a quite hard question. I was just curious.
Rose Radke:It is interesting. I probably need to give it more thought.
Hollie Sanglier:I definitely answered the question. So to talk about measuring the impact I know we talked about this at the beginning the kind of ROI of a brand. What are some of the ways to measure the effectiveness or impact of a branded workspace on employees or clients or business?
Rose Radke:performance. So the obvious when it's talking to people, it's really, really important to actually have conversations with your employees of how they're finding the space, whether they're feeling at home, whether they feel a sense of belonging, whether they are able to live your values and whether the vibe is right. Always best to get someone, I think, to get someone external to do that. People tend to be much more honest if they are talking to someone that doesn't have a vested interest in their responses, or they might have a vested interest, but they're not going to feel offended if they give about the feedback they're giving. Also, to make it anonymous, often a great shout. You can also do surveys in the space. So if you've got iPads, for instance, around the space, you can have surveys that change every day. You can ask people when they're making a cup of coffee. They might just have a minute to respond to a couple of questions. That's a good way to collect feedback.
Rose Radke:You can have feedback cards. That's kind of old school just scribble something down and pop it in a post-box. The main thing is that when you take that data, when you actually gather feedback from people, if you want to measure impact, you have to analyse that. This is what people are saying. How are we going to adapt based on that? What are we going to do with this information? What are we going to change? That comes back to making sure that you are adaptable in the space. Whatever you implement is not sealed too heavily, so it's quite good to be able to be a bit flexible and fluid with your space.
Hollie Sanglier:Particularly if people are on long leases, like 5 years or 10 years, they might need to collect all that information over the course of their lease so that, when it comes to the end of it, it's not just a small group of people deciding whether they stay or go. It would be really useful.
Lisa McLeod:An interesting thing about what Rose just said was about having a space being adaptable and changeable. Let's use an office layout as an example. If you were working in a very static desk, everyone's got their own desk. Some people have got their own office Suddenly. Take Covid as an example.
Lisa McLeod:Post-covid, everyone wants to work hybrid. Some people want to work from home, some people want to work from a sofa, some people want to work from a pod. If your office isn't set up for that, immediately those brand values or brand personality is gone, because the flexibility and hybridness of your workforce now is not conducive in your office. So you have to change fundamentally how it works, and flexibility in the workspace is so important. Then Can you pull across the curtain and make something a bit more private. Can you soften a space? Can you make employees feel at home in your space by having these softer environments or being able to move things around.
Lisa McLeod:Maybe collaboration is really important. Suddenly, on a project, maybe a project team are working and they've come to the point in their project where they need to collaborate a lot more. So can you quickly change that workspace and make a collaboration zone? It's all about having clever pieces in your space, whether it be furniture or the space itself. Having that in your space so you can change it and adapt it quickly, because that could equally affect your brand values.
Hollie Sanglier:Absolutely Thinking about the future, any upcoming trends in workspace branding or branding generally that you're seeing or particularly around the employee and community?
Rose Radke:Well, one thing that I do think is quite interesting is I'm very interested in AI in general. I think it's intriguing, it's terrifying, it's brilliant, it's awful.
Hollie Sanglier:It's all of those things.
Rose Radke:Lots of people are very excited about it. Lots of people are very worried about it.
Rose Radke:Personally, I'm not massively worried about it right now, because I just think that human input is absolutely key in pretty much all areas of life and work. I think AI spatial planning software is something I'm hearing quite a bit about. So you can kind of tell a bot, a robot, what the requirements are of space and they can give you countless options for what could work in terms of layout. Yeah, it could be useful, but human input is obviously going to be really important because AI can't connect on an emotional level. That's what branding is all about. It's about creating emotional connections with audiences. I just don't know that. I think AI spatial planning software will be very useful in certain circumstances, when in the right hands human hands.
Rose Radke:I think also as an interesting rise in need for freelance creatives. This is a new area I'm kind of seeing and leaning into. People are really interested in kind of thinking outside the box. At the moment there's kind of limitless possibilities, it seems, and yeah, really smart companies are just trying to think very differently and I love that and I think that can. Really, that's really important when we're talking about space as well is how can we think differently? How can we think beyond the confines of the desk or the meeting room? How can we think about how people live, not just work what they need. How can we think about neurodiversity? And I just think that thinking very creatively, thinking very still strategically but differently, is going to be absolutely key. It's very, very exciting. That's my passion right now is bringing creativity into my work.
Lisa McLeod:That's all peace out what rose was just talking about in terms of space options. Don't tell our clients that that's terrifying. Don't go and get all these little spatial options by AI. But no, I think you can and I think you can do it cleverly. But what AI doesn't achieve is the nuance. And you know, talking to your staff and hearing what Amy said at the in your meeting about not having a place to work or a place to be able to do this thing, or actually they want the desk to feel really soft because they are reactive. You know neurodiverse in terms of touch. You know that AI can't do that yet. If it, I hope it can't ever, because will I be out?
Hollie Sanglier:of a job, we'll shut down.
Rose Radke:I think it's really interesting because I'm sure in a lot of ways, you'll be able to use some of these tools in AI spaces to enhance what you do as a, definitely, and to save time. That's what it is. Ai is just time saving, yeah, and it's opening up room for creativity. It's actually, you know, okay, let's get a few basic options. We won't then have to spend a day doing, you know, marking up, drawings and doing kind of Doing what we do.
Rose Radke:Yeah, we can actually spend that time thinking really creatively about how best to service the needs of this team and we can spend time talking to them and engaging them and really understanding them, Because you sit down for half an hour with someone, you won't get very far, you know. You get a surface level chat going on. You might be able to be like I'll say what do you need at work, and they'll be like um, yeah, like just spaces to me, or maybe like it would be nice to have a bit of space to be alone sometimes and I'd like the coffee machine area to be better.
Lisa McLeod:What does that mean?
Rose Radke:Yeah, yeah, but then you spend an hour with them and you really dig down and you'll get some really deep insights into what they really need on an emotional level, what's really going to bring them in and what's going to make them want to stay with that company because they feel that they belong, they feel at home, they feel really passionate about the space and it's where they want to spend time.
Lisa McLeod:We do a lot of employee engagement actually at the start of projects and actually going in spending a whole day or even a few days in a company and just witnessing from the outside, not even talking to people to start with. How do people watching how people use the space, how long are they taking to do this task? How many people are in that room while they're having a meeting? You know, is the space officially used? And then we would go to each member of staff or key members from the teams and talk to them about what's important to you, what do your teams need. You know what's practical for you, but also, how do you feel in the space? What's missing? What do you love? We find that out about staff and that really drives how we end up space planning the space.
Rose Radke:And AI is never going to do that.
Lisa McLeod:No.
Rose Radke:You're never going to have robots sitting outside a room and then be able to actually talk to someone as they come out and get a real feeling of whether they've had enough fresh air in that time, how the light in there has affected them, whether they're exhausted because they're overwhelmed by the lack of natural light or the level of artificial lighting in that space. You know there's so much you can understand just by going and engaging with someone at a very specific point in time on a very emotional level, with kindness. I don't think you are at risk of being replaced by AI?
Hollie Sanglier:I don't. I think it's just going to complement. It already does. It complements what I do all the time. It's really helpful. I don't think he'll ever play.
Lisa McLeod:I am dreamy of the day when I can just talk to my AutoCAD programme and say, right, build all my walls up to 2.4, and can you put this type of ceiling in please? And what does it look like if we put this finish here, like how quickly it can generate? That's very exciting to me. Someone do this now Quick.
Hollie Sanglier:I don't think we're very far away from that. It's exciting Good. Well, we're coming towards the end. Thank you so much for joining us today, Rose Always a pleasure.
Hollie Sanglier:It's been great, and you can connect with Rose on LinkedIn. Her link will be in our show notes and we'll also have her website on there as well. So thank you very much and join us next time, and we will look forward to seeing you then. Thank you, goodbye. This podcast is sponsored by Projects, the home for better business. With two beautiful buildings open in the heart of Brighton, one in the lanes and one moment from the beach, plus many more set to open across the UK. Projects is proud to house a community of collaborative businesses. They change and operate inspiring spaces that make everyone feel included. Projects combines co-working areas, dedicated desks and fully serviced offices with meeting and event spaces, cafes, bars and a gym, and this podcast suite. Find out more, book a tour and arrange a free trial via their website, wwwprojectsclubcouk. Plus, you can let them know that you've heard about them via the spaces that shape us to receive 25% off your first podcast suite booking.
