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Ever since Get Your Guide was founded in 2008 by four friends, the booking platform for touristic activities has been growing tremendously. Hitting a new phase of growth, Get Your Guide decided to merge their several offices into one, moving into a prestigious historical building in the heart of Berlin. In today’s demanding business world, an office space can be a powerful strategic tool to reach entrepreneurial goals and enable a required work attitude, as well as support necessary workflows and foster a uniting corporate culture. Get Your Guide was faced with the question of where the young company was heading and which workplace design would best support their ambitions. Inspired by psychological principles and a strategic approach, Rlevance led a research and development process with management and team to define a new workplace strategy for Get Your Guide’s new office space. The aim was to help them reach their business goals, fulfill current and future functional work and social requirements, and support the organization’s thriving culture.
Holistic understanding of requirements
Get Your Guide’s aims for their new workplace strategy were to support their business goals, provide a well-fitting work tool, reflect their cultural values, and become a more attractive employer. Before creating an office space concept that would be tailored to their individual needs, it was necessary to go on a learning journey and understand the workplace setting holistically: business aims, work and social needs, and the current spatial setup.
One-on-one interviews with the founders and the executive board built the foundation of our research where we explored overarching business goals and challenges, and values of the brand and organizational cultural to be communicated.
To understand the functional requirements of day-to-day work, we went on to conduct online interviews with middle management on topics like space requirements, work styles, and meeting routines. In workshops with team leads, we looked at collaboration routines within and across teams, and at the social side of office life. To identify needs that were not yet articulated and to understand the space ourselves, we ran observation rounds in the space and studied real-life behavior, flanked with spontaneous conversations with employees.
A strategic framework to guide redesign
The knowledge acquired helped us to establish a comprehensive catalogue of needs, both from business and employee side. Based on the needs we formulated design principles that would give direction for the workplace strategy during its redesign process. Important challenges were the need to stay flexible as an organization, to allow for more spontaneous encounters, and to attract/retain talent. As a bridge to the actual design process, we created a vocabulary of repeating work and social settings that needed to be present in Get Your Guide’s future workplace.
Meta-level concept ideas that bridge strategy and implementation
Based on the building bricks of needs, goals, design principles and work/social settings, we then created the actual workplace strategy for Get Your Guide. It inspired us to a range of conceptual ideas for the workspace that would bring the strategy to live. In a following programming approach, we mapped work settings in the floor plan, trying to achieve an ideal constellation of spatial distances between teams. We complemented the spatial programming with a meeting room set up that would meet current and future demands. A variety of zones were created to improve the social side of work. Last but not least we came up with ideas of how to bring the brand and cultural values to life.
The new workplace strategy and concept was handed over to be implemented by Kinzo interior designers who created the design of the workplace. Through this close collaboration, we created a new concept for the Get Your Guide workplace which acts as a powerful tool to reach business goals, caters to current and future functional requirements of the teams, and supports the organization’s culture. Ultimately it helped Get You Guide on their venture into a prosperous future.
Are you faced with similar corporate challenges? We would love to hear about them.
