Story: Edge Workspaces

Edge Workspaces

An office is not square metres. An office is a mood. Walk into one that works and your shoulders drop before you've put your bag down. Walk into one that doesn't and no amount of barista coffee will save it. Edge Workspaces builds some of the most sustainable, tech-forward buildings in the world. The architecture was doing the heavy lifting. The brand story wasn't quite keeping up.

All the ingredients were in place: low-carbon construction, smart systems, daylight and air that actually behave themselves. What was missing was the human sentence that connected the building to the person standing inside it.

Listening across Amsterdam, Berlin and everywhere in between

We ran an intensive co-creative process with the international Edge team across offices: Amsterdam to Berlin, engineers to hospitality leads, product to commercial. The goal wasn't to invent a new story, it was to find the one people were already telling at their own desks, and turn up the volume on it.

Using 23plusone we tested which of the 24 fundamental human drivers the team kept returning to when they described a good day at work in an Edge building. Vitality kept showing up first. Then mastery, then a quieter driver that often gets skipped in corporate real estate: belonging. A workspace that reliably delivers those three isn't "a nice office," it's a condition for doing your best work.

"The sessions with BR-ND People helped us finally find the language for the invisible value we create every day." Edge Workspaces team member

Purpose that earns its rent

Out of that came a clear purpose: people need better workplaces to do their best work, and the building has to carry its weight in that equation. Values got translated into active principles, the kind that survive contact with a Monday morning: hospitality with a heart, environments that spark focus and flow, and service that notices before it's asked.

That shifted the conversation with clients. Edge buildings stopped being described as sustainable real estate and started being described as working communities, which is a much better thing to pay rent for.

Building places that have to perform as spaces and as brand?

If your organisation builds, runs or designs places where people work, and the experience inside them is doing more strategic work than your brand is currently giving it credit for, there's a way to find the language for it. Let's talk about it.

Reach out to Kim or Alexander if you're looking for something similar

Related reading

• Attractive culture, attractive brand
• Translating core values into concrete workplace behavior