Bethany: Welcome to Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their strategies. I’m Bethany Andell, President of Savage Brands, and my guest today is Lauri Goodman Lampson, President of PDR. Welcome Lauri.

Lauri: Thank you, Bethany.

Bethany: I’d love to just quickly hear about PDR and your purpose.

Lauri: As a workplace consulting and design firm, we believe that thoughtful placemaking, it connects people and inspires organizations to thrive.

Bethany: That’s great, because you know we always talk about 360 brands, and that branding is actually the entire experience, and it’s probably often time forgotten about the workplace experience in itself. How to you go about connecting workplace to purpose?

Lauri: Well, when an organization can explicitly connect their purpose to their workplace, they will make that connection with all of the individuals that work for them, and that’s what they’re really looking for. People really want to connect to the organization they are working with at the me, we, world level, I’ll call it.  So, at the individual level, they really want to feel the energy of the collective, right? So, that human energy in the space. At the group level, they really want a collegial environment. So, whether you’re working with everyone that you see and are around or not, you feel connected to some common goal. And people also want to feel like they’re working on something bigger than themselves, having an impact on the world. So, literally having a view to the impact that we can have on the world.

Bethany: That’s really interesting, you know, and I think about decisions that are made, and investments  are made, and you know the question is always, well, does it really work? Are there results? Do you have some examples of how this has worked for maybe some of your clients or even for PDR?

Lauri: Yes, absolutely. We recently worked with a Fortune 100 energy company that really made a big shift in their workplace strategy and solution for the explicit purpose of connecting their business strategy to their workplace, and connecting their people. So, it’s really important to them that everybody understood what their goal was, and how they were going to get there, and they were going to need the collective to get there together. So, before and after making this change, we measured some key performance indicators, and found that employee engagement rose by 25%, and at the group level, cohesion increased by 200%, and those two metrics together correlate to about a 10% increase in productivity.

Bethany: That’s really impressive. Well, Lauri, thank you for being here today. This concludes my conversation with Lauri in this episode of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their strategies.