Your office says a lot about your company. After all, it’s your opportunity to brand your physical space and to show off your company’s culture to visitors, from suppliers and clients to potential new employees.
That’s one of the reasons why the workplace design sector is a multi-million dollar industry, and why companies like Google install slides and foosball tables in an attempt to be seen as trendy and hip. And it’s certainly true that the physical layout and design of your office have an impact on the way that your company is perceived. But at the same time, your workplace isn’t just consciously sculpted, and it also reflects some of the subconscious biases and culture traits that are going on beneath the hood.
So if your employees work in tiny grey cubicles but everyone on the senior management team has a massive office that they barely use, that’s sending out a message to people whether you like it or not. And the same is true if your sales and marketing teams are working out of different buildings or if they’re socialising separately and not communicating.
Why workplace design is important
We’ve already established that getting the workplace design right is important because of the messages that it sends out to people. But it’s as important as it is because of which people you can reach with it. After all, if you take the time to emphasise the connection between sales and marketing, your employees will start to buy into it too.
One of the biggest problems that we see with sales and marketing teams in today’s landscape is that they work in isolation. Even when it seems as though they’re working together towards the same goals, they blame each other for any failures. When they’re being measured on the number of marketing leads that turn into customers, sales blames marketing for not creating good quality leads and marketing blames sales for not converting them.
If you can design your office in such a way that your sales and marketing teams are in close physical proximity, you increase the odds of them working together in harmony. The same goes if you bring both departments together for social events or training. Even giving them a communal informal area with refreshments can help to foster collaboration. That’s why Google provides free food for its employees – and also why it deliberately makes them wait in line for it and why the seating is so close together.
Conclusion
When we talk about your workplace and workplace design, we don’t mean you need to spend huge amounts of money to redesign it. At the same time, there are a few simple things that you can do to foster collaboration between your employees, and encouraging your sales and marketing teams to work together is the most important thing of all. It’s the collaboration between the two departments that will ultimately decide whether your business is a success or a failure.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.