A prominent design company specialises in interiors that reflect the corporate cultures of its clients. And getting a corporate culture right is a subject that the company intimately understands.
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Entrepreneur: Peter Geyer, Managing Director
Company: Geyer Pty Ltd
Business type: Interior environment consultancy
Founded: 1977
Employees: 80 - 90
Turnover: (2002 - 2003) $13M
Head office: Sydney and Melbourne, Australia
Contact details: Sydney: +61 2 9248 3222; Melbourne: +61 3 9654 3644
The Geyer Story
As a provider of interior environments for large corporate workplaces and retail facilities such as shopping centres and food chains, Geyer’s approach goes far deeper than just interior design. Its managing director, Peter Geyer, says culture is the ultimate differentiator between organisations. “We look for differences, not similarities. What we produce should be a physical manifestation of your business strategy, your brand and indeed, your values. We want to provide a physical tool for building a stronger workplace culture.
“The modern workplace is almost defined by an absence of offices,” Geyer says. “It’s all about speed to market, improved collaboration and camaraderie. And, of course, people increasingly are using a whole network of places to work, either interstate or around the world. They touch down in these places and need to feel part of a global culture.”
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Key learning points:
- Listening - In order to provide superior service and fully meet clients’ needs, it is essential to thoroughly understand their goals and motivations. Listen to clients: their ideas are among the best resources for meeting their needs.
- Corporate culture - Encourage a leadership culture by providing accessible ongoing learning at workplaces. Informal and formal learning opportunities should always be available.
- Staff support - Give new employees time to adapt to their new company’s culture, attitudes and methods. Coaching and support will help ease the transition to a new workplace culture and help avert employee burn-out.
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Geyer’s culture is a demanding one, which emphasises continuous learning. External experts or Geyer’s staff give frequent lunchtime presentations on design-related topics, IT issues and strategic consulting matters. Geyer says that people who join the company - even if they have been in senior positions - face a steep learning curve. Part of that stretch is learning to think more holistically, to go beyond design issues and explore a client’s business culture and strategic goals. Not all of the company’s creative design specialists are comfortable with that.
Geyer says: “Many people in design and architecture feel that they are artists and that some clients are in fact a bit of an impediment. We encourage artistic expression but we do expect our team to gain an in-depth understanding of what the client wants, including the underlying cultural aspects of that client’s business. Clients have some really interesting things to contribute even in terms of design solutions.”
The company’s reputation as a kind of university for interior environments differentiates it from competitors and helps to attract talented people. However, Geyer has learnt that there are limits to how far people can be stretched. Between 1999 and 2001, staff turnover reached 20%.
Geyer says: “You’re bringing creative people into a way of doing things that is often outside their comfort zone. So there was a burn-out factor related to that. We could have handled this more sensitively, making sure that we understood where a person was coming from, accepting that from the start, and then reviewing continuously how that person was progressing.”
Other factors played a part in contributing to the internal difficulties during this period, including a new structure for the company, which changed from a unit trust structure of seven directors to a larger proprietary limited company in which people could buy shares once they were appointed as associates.
Geyer says: “Having a smaller group of people running a business is easier than a larger group. There was bound to be added stress but it was more at the management level of just sorting things out. There was some friction, for example, over changed roles and getting people to understand that they were expected to think strategically as well as to deliver project work.”
The high staff turnover between 1999 and 2001 was also fuelled by the volatility of the design and architecture businesses in those years, which included the post-Olympics building slump. In 2000, the company hired an organisational psychologist to help staff deal with change management and conflict resolution issues, improve the company’s performance/reward structure and foster more effective communication skills.
The psychologist is still working with the company but her focus is now more external. One of her key roles is to assist Geyer’s clients with change management strategies, in the case of office relocations, for example. The company also has a full-time human resources person, which Geyer says is rare in the interior design industry. Staff turnover is now back to an acceptable level of 5% a year.