Corporate Design

Between 1950 and 2020, the average working adult in the U.S. spent approximately one-third of their waking hours at their job.  As industrial and agricultural work gave way to the service industry, many of those hours were spent by people sitting at a desk in an office building.  Those are the people we are dedicated to serving.  Our goal as corporate workplace planners and designers is to improve the lives of corporate workers while contributing to the success of the companies they work for.  The two are intertwined – a happy and healthy employee is a productive, creative, and engaged employee, helping to propel the business forward.

As the definitions of employee well-being and employee happiness evolve, business leaders are faced with many choices on how to foster employee engagement, drive innovation, enhance collaboration, and attract and retain employees who have other employment options, including opportunities to work from home.  Through our research and decades of experience, we help clients sort through these choices and find what they believe will work best for them during the design of their workplaces.

Corporate Design Process

We approach each workplace design project as a fact-finding mission, closely integrating our design team with your leadership, staff, and Board of Directors to build an unbiased view of the current state of your facilities and your business We also work together to determine what the future state of your workspaces should be based on your view of the future. Our team leads reviews of your buildings, processes, and customer engagement, and then helps determine shortcomings and opportunities based on your business plan, facilitates ideation, creates possible solutions, and leads consensus-building and decision-making efforts at all stages. Workplace design is not a single event, it is iterative as ideas are reviewed, goals are reinforced, and we work together to define the future of “office work” and how that impacts your unique workplace.

The process starts by capturing the myriad of voices you wish to engage in discussion about your workplace. We facilitate a process with them composed of innovative “immersive design” techniques to gather information including one-on-one and group interviews, day-in-the-life shadowing, road tours to visit other workplaces, corporate workplace design seminars that share lessons learned, visioning sessions, interactive puzzle play, and other collaborative workshops.  Only then can we combine our architectural and interior design experience with that of other consultants to begin creating the three-dimensional form.  At each meeting, another layer of detail is added, revealing new aspects of the concept with state-of-the-art visualization tools and material samples to convey exactly what we are creating together.

Whether you’re building a new corporate headquarters, rearranging an existing facility in response to work-from-home initiatives, adding a new employee working cafe or office coffee bar, or even if you want to know what other employers are doing to attract and retain employees, we can help.  But we can also apply our experience to numerous other needs you may have, such as facility assessments, master planning, environmental graphics, branding, furniture and accessories, and sustainability consulting.

STUDIO LEADERS

All of these services are led by the three Partners in our Corporate Design Studio – Michael Brush (Milwaukee), Michael Sobczak (Milwaukee), and John Holz (Sarasota).  Each of these leaders personally works with clients from the very first meeting to the completion of the project, supported by a staff of experienced architects and interior designers, many of whom have two to three decades of corporate design experience as well.  We invite you to follow the links on this page to learn more about our experience helping to transform the workplace, or better yet, contact Michael, Michael, or John to learn more about what we may accomplish working together to design your workspace.