The talent crisis and employee preferences for WFH means workplaces need to utilise office spaces as a tool to connect with staff. In Better Workplaces, AdNews looks at how agencies are utilising office design to entice staff to come in and create a company culture worth staying for.
Thinkerbell’s new North office was designed by and for a creative agency, who else could bring such inventive ideas to life?
Featuring two front doors, bright hues of green and pink, an eight-metre marble bar, continuous winding desks and an extensive balcony that overlooks Sydney's Redfern Park which occasionally agency staff use to spy on the Rabbitohs rugby league club training.
Adam Ferrier, founder and consumer psychologist at Thinkerbell, wrote on LinkedIn: “So happy to finally have a home rather than our absurd home office AirBnB set up we had for a while.”
Only just moving into their new Refern office in August, Paul Swann, executive creative tinker at Thinkerbell, spoke to AdNews about how and why the agency channelled a “hotel lobby vibe” in the design.
Swann said: “The space looks quite different to what it would have looked like if the whole pandemic hadn't happened, because we've just tried to acknowledge the fact that working practices have inherently changed.
“The way we designed the space was once we had the location, we engaged the whole agency to help us. We crowdsourced ideas and thoughts that people had found creatively inspiring in other environments and mashed them all together.
“That's partly why I believe we’ve got such a good reaction from the staff because it's rare to get the opportunity to create a space and actually see your ideas coming to life.
“And obviously, that's the name of the game, we're trying to create a space that people are inspired to come into every day."
The main goals for Thinkerbell’s design were to create an office that, one, encouraged collaboration and, two, instigates chance encounters with different people.
Swann said: “We're a growing agency, so there's always new people in here as we're trying to encourage clients, partners and different businesses we might be working with to work from our office.
“So we're hoping that there'll be lots of agency people around to be familiar with, but also always some new people popping in.
“We didn't want to hive everyone off into rooms so instead we tried to create a hotel lobby vibe.
“Which is why there are lots of communal and workshopping spaces, which encourages coworkers to spark up conversations regardless of how much they know each other because I think that's when collaboration is at its best.”
Jonathan Berger, the fixer at Thinkerbell.
Giant weaving desks
After years of remote working where staff are not doing much casual networking, Thinkerbell’s central design principle of encouraging small talk heavily influenced the desk layout.
“I was very keen from the outset to not have formulaic rows of desks,” Swann said, “because the desks are always the office’s dominant area, we wanted to do something different.
“Probably from an efficiency perspective, you wouldn't do this configuration as it uses up more space. But what it does mean is that people have to walk a bit of a winding road which encourages them to stop and chat to their coworkers along their way.
“There's space for each of our 40 employees at the desks, but we’re not imagining everyone would be in every day since there are work flexibilities for people.
“But we're really hoping that there'll be times where everyone is in, as a full house gives the best office vibe with people buzzing and connecting.”
Eight-metre marble bar
As a crucial component of every agency, a bar creates a much-needed relaxed aesthetic.
“We put a lot of effort into making the bar space very welcoming, so it isn't just for drinking, as people often work and eat lunch from there.
“The seating area next to the bar also ties into the hotel lobby vibe we were going for, where people can casually sit with their computers and interact with one another.
“There are a few subtle things we've done that maybe no one really noticed, but in Melbourne, they have a marbling effect bar that is very similar to our bar here.
“But their's is pink, so we mirrored that with green.”
Zoom rooms
“Since we outgrew our last office the world has changed a lot in terms of remote working and working through video conferencing.
“So our new space has got more spaces conducive to one to three people who might need some quiet space to Zoom in.”
The BX room
“A big part of the Thinkerbell brand is workshopping, which we call think tanks, so the BX room and the good room are dedicated spaces for that since we wanted this office to hard-code our business practices and principles into how we behave.
“The BX room is a pretty significant portion of the office, which is very much focused on fostering those kinds of workshop practices.
“The BX room is a place you want people to feel really comfortable spending a half day or full day in. So we used green here to make the space as inviting and welcoming as possible.
“It’s still a bit of a work in progress, but we will be putting a lot of plants and green vegetation into that space to bring as much positive and natural energy as possible.”
The good room
“The good room is also a boardroom which again we tried to think about slightly differently.
“As often boardrooms have a very distinct destination at one end where a presenter would stand. Instead, we've gone for a circular approach to encourage the notion of giving everyone a voice at the table to ensure everyone can share their thoughts.
“The good room is also pink in contrast to the BX room, as pink is more energising and vibrant which matches the energy of the big meetings that take place in the room.”
Colour palette
“Thinkerbell has a clear brand, look and feel, with obviously the pink and green being with us from the beginning - it made sense that we brought those colours through.
“So the colour palette wasn't necessarily a case of looking into colour theory, but instinctively thinking about what felt right based on how those rooms were going to be used.
“It's nice to have a bright palette, but the main space is white because we were conscious about overdoing the pink and green.
“Instead the pink and green are used as highlights to ensure we created an inviting and welcoming environment that’s not too intense.”
Two front doors?
Through the elevator doors on level four, you arrive at Thinkerbell’s office entrance but, unlike typical offices, guests are greeted by two front doors, one green and one pink.
So which do you pick? The measure door which is green? Or the magic door which is pink?
“The two front doors are embedding our brand’s notion of duality from the outset, as we have the thinker and the tinker, the pink and the green.
“We all come into the same office every day and it just felt like it'd be interesting to give people a choice.
“We're a creative business and we wanted to challenge convention from the outset.
“I kind of sit in line of sight at the entrance, so I can see the reactions and that's genuinely quite fulfilling because it's not often that you see people coming into the office and having that kind of reaction, a smile on their face and a bit of a wow moment.”
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