Workplace as an industry – like many others – has a tendency to operate within a specialist bubble. While it’s valuable to benchmark and learn from what comparable organisations are doing, it does carry the risk of closed-loop thinking, limiting the potential breadth of innovation that we could be exploring.

Benchmarking across innovative workplaces is a crucial part of our approach, but we also look more broadly at experience innovation – sometimes to quite unexpected areas. Learning from other sectors can broaden perspectives and provide fresh insights and ideas, whether it’s a new point of view from a sector dealing with similar issues, or innovations that could be re-purposed to drive experiences within the workplace.

Retail is an excellent example of this, with retailers ahead of the game in moving towards what we call omnichannel experiences, blurring the boundaries between physical and digital. This is a valuable area for workplace to learn from, with increasingly high expectations for frictionless digital experiences at work. Colleague expectations for digital interactions are essentially being set by the interactions and experiences within their daily lives.

For example, Sephora – an international beauty products retailer – offers personalised omnichannel experiences to their customers. Their digital channels encourage customers to book in-store experiences, and they offer an app with an ‘in-store companion’ that makes the transition from virtual browsing to in-person shopping seamless.

Looking at the direction of travel for retail, personalisation is a key theme for smart technology in these environments. It can even be called a ‘hygiene factor’ – customers take it for granted, but if a retailer gets it wrong, customers may depart for a competitor. Once limited mainly to targeted offers, personalisation now extends to the entire customer experience. This means that customers want personalisation throughout their interactions with a retailer—with multiple, personalised touchpoints that enable them to allocate their time and money according to their preferences.

Customers receive offers that are targeted not just at customers like them, with brands targeting at the segment level with broad-based offers, but at them as individuals, with products, offers, and communications that are uniquely relevant to them. How can we start to think about the expectation for personalisation at work – particularly when the typical approach is activity-based, rather than assigned space?

This is the first in a series of posts where we’ll be highlighting interesting innovations across a range of sectors and posing the question – what does it all mean for workplace?