Virtually everyone in the modern workforce is aware of the company called Glassdoor. It’s an invaluable resource to anyone hoping to make smart, informed career decisions – offering job postings, regional salary information, position-specific interview tools, general company intelligence and real-life company reviews from current and former employees.
While it may feel like Glassdoor has been around forever, it’s just 11 years old, and has successfully raced through its years running under the start-up moniker. Glassdoor’s competitors include everyone in the job posting game, from the little guys all the way up to giants like LinkedIn and Monster. The company recently set about redefining its brand to keep up with growth and form a secure path into the future.
Glassdoor headquarters, located north of San Francisco in Mill Valley, California, had grown haphazardly along with the company, accommodating more people with increasingly disjointed design concepts. The company’s new Chicago location, designed by Valerio Dewalt Train Associates, would present the brand in its new form – a more sophisticated brand with staying power.
In redefining its brand, Glassdoor wanted to accomplish two key things:
>Translate Glassdoor’s maturation as a company to their workspace
>Create a space that puts its Chicago employees first – harmonious with the core of Glassdoor’s vision for a more sophisticated career development experience.
“Realizing these two goals meant providing an environment reflective of their millennial workforce, committed to the raw and exciting urbanism of Chicago’s Fulton Market District,” notes the project description. “At the same time it is meant to embrace their hard-earned maturity and sophistication as a company dedicated to improving the workplace through their website, a human resources platform, for staff and employers alike.”
Because the brand was being redefined in tandem with the design of the new Chicago offices, Valerio Dewalt Train went through a healthy dose of back-and-forth visioning workshops with the client. Together they formed a workplace strategy centered around three key goals:
1. Create a contiguous and free-flowing workplace. “We wanted to develop a free-flowing feel of the workstations, so that teams could expand and contract as needed, without fighting against a wall of conference rooms,” said Joe Lawton, principal at Valerio Dewalt Train.
2. Maximize natural daylighting and gorgeous city views. Located in Chicago’s coveted Fulton Market district, the new offices are west of the Loop. Occupying the 6thand 7thfloors, the space offers floor-to-ceiling windows and views to downtown (east), the south and west.
3. Create natural security. “Everyone sits at an open workstation, so we wanted to create a series of nodes at the entry that would create an inherent sense of security, but in a subtle way,” said Mr. Lawton.
At the entryway, three portals lead staff and visitors deeper into the office. One leads into the western office areas, another leads into the east side office areas, and the third leads to a training area. Across 59,857 square feet, the nodes are organized to divide the floor into neighborhoods of workstations and amenity zones, including a large café.
Valerio Dewalt Train surveyed the Chicago staff, proposing a few different themes to use for naming areas of the floor plan, and the staff settled on a Chicago neighborhoods theme – choosing names from neighborhoods all across the Chicago grid: West Loop, Logan Square, The Loop, Southside and Lakeview. Within each neighborhood, the branding moments and meeting room names take inspiration from everything Chicago – whether architectural, pop culture, restaurants, you name it.
“Everywhere, the employees have ample room to take ownership of their own workstations and communal locations,” reads the project description. “Shared spaces across the office provide chalkboard walls, writable calendars, empty planters and pin-up space that inspire interaction. All surrounded on every side by floor to ceiling glass with striking views of the Loop and the entire city.”
Glassdoor’s branding message was simple: empowering humans, authentic, trusting. Valerio Dewalt Train used that message to guide the development of a series of original branding moments throughout the space.
A mixture of 70+ unique branding experiences include framed graphics, art installations and custom textile and other material installations.
The space had supple, curvilinear shaped walls to begin with, which Mr. Lawton noted can sometimes be difficult to work with when trying create a neighborhood feel. Marisa Lehnert, Glassdoor’s newly appointed creative director, guided the ship by keeping Valerio Dewalt Train up-to-date on the direction of Glassdoor’s company branding changes. The new brand identity would put forth a clean, neutral feel, with pops of color, and the Chicago offices follow suit.
Lawton and Joe Valerio, founding principal of Valerio Dewalt Train, said that while the project presented its challenges (they needed to realign a couple times, accommodating shifting decisions on brand identity), at the end, the design team found that they had hit it just right.
Glassdoor had originally leased two full floors in the building, but initially only needed a build-out of a floor and a half. Now, they’re requesting design services to build-out the remaining half of the 7thfloor – with no changes.
“Usually, there’s some type of feedback that you incorporate on future buildouts – some area of the floor that didn’t work the way they thought it would, an underutilized area or workstation adjustment,” said Mr. Valerio. “But they came back to us asking for the exact same thing – just more. That’s really rare, and we were very happy to hear that we got it right the first time around.”