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How workplace design can support your company goals
Case study: OneFit | Amsterdam Headquarters
The city workouts in your pocket
OneFit is a company that offers a digital membership that gives you access to a variety of workouts in the city. OneFit’s ambition is to be recognized as THE urban lifestyle fitness brand, inspiring people to be part of a city-wide movement and motivating them to stay fit.
OneFit pushes for experience sports and fitness in a way that is diverse, easy and fun. In our design proposal for their new office space, we encapsulated the essence of who this company is and what they stand for.
Company culture and employees engagement
As every project at AKKA, we start our process by a deep dive into understanding the strength and boldness of the OneFit brand. The brand of a company represents its “external level”, the one in contact with people outside the company. In this case, the membership users. Moreover, companies, at least the successful one, have an “internal brand” as well, that is the company culture, that is connected with the employees experience and their engagement with the company.
After the deeper analysis, we realized that the OneFit employees are in a particular position: they are both employees and members. Because of that, we focused our attention on expanding the brand into the company culture, and embodying it in the workplace design. Our design proposal aims to include both levels, the external brand and the internal one.
From the workouts in Amsterdam to the workouts in the workplace
By capturing the brand and identity of OneFit, we wanted to give the feeling of the company to the employees, to experience who OneFit is and what they are working for, in their workplace on a daily basis. In order to achieve that, it was very important to show the impact of their work. The impact on the individual level of the customers, the person who uses the app and is healthy, active, working out in different parts of the city and enjoying the lifestyle. By keeping the company’s end impact close to the employees, they remain engaged and connected to the purpose of the company.
The design of the new office is based on recreating the city in the office. The new workplace features a number of different workout activities. The different workouts were planned in connection to the different modes of work. For example, we planned meditative workouts – like yoga – close to the silent and focused work areas. The matching was not just about proximity and atmosphere but also based on functional use of materials. The use of soft yoga props helped this silent part of the office with its acoustic properties. Introducing in the space the objects, textures and materials you would usually find in a yoga class invites people to behave accordingly. The space is subconsciously telling you: “This is not the right space for brainstorming sessions. You are here to silently focus”. Following this logic, a variety of spaces has been created in order to guarantee a flexible, dynamic and fun work environment.
To help employees understand but most importantly feel how their role contributes to the organization’s mission, the workspace needs to remind them at all times. This is done by immersing employees in the very experience they are creating for their customers, so the employees can put themselves in the shoes of the customers.
Employees’ cohesion
The employees’ connection with the company culture and vision helps to keep a good level of engagement, even when the company is dealing with internal changes. OneFit was facing one of these changes, as the company is growing and increasing the number of its employees.
The feeling of unity – that is needed to successfully guide the company’s growth and consolidate the bond among the employees – materialised in the idea of a running track that goes through the entire office. We created a path that”runs” through all the workplaces, linking different departments, meeting rooms and common areas. It is a visual line that gives people the feeling of being connected. A deconstructed running track became one of the main elements in OneFit’s new workplace.
Work with joy
In order to complete our ambition to reflect OneFit’s identity into the workplace, we introduced in the new office some of the graphic elements of the brand, We deconstructed, reconstructed and played with the colour palette, geometrical shapes, and sports references. In addition, we literally brought to life some of the company icons, by ‘extruding’ them to create playful furniture. They became flexible modules that can be used in different layouts to create different varieties of lounges and seating configuration.
This is an example of how the workspace integrates fun elements, opportunities to decompress, and temptations for joy and relaxation. In this workplace, joy is sometimes offered as a distraction from work, as a break, but also and more importantly as an integrated way of working. Instead of engaging in a cycle of stress- decompress-stress-decompress..etc, the design offers the opportunity to eliminate stress in the first place and work with joy all along. Instead of trying to balance serious work and fun play, why not aim for fun work and serious play?
Are you interested in learning how your workplace design can boost your company goals?
Request here AKKA’s Innovative Workplace Expert Guide where we show you in details how we have boosted different organisations through the design of their workplace.
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