Hot on the “wheels” of our Oracle Red Bull Racing blog last week, where we described our shared passion for innovation, I wanted to expand on how embracing a design-driven culture can fuel it.

Ask any designer what design means to them, and doubtless, you’ll receive various answers. However, most agree that design shouldn’t be constrained to just the confines of a company’s design department.

Instead, design is everywhere and should inspire businesses to entice employees to think and act like designers. That’s if you genuinely seek innovation, want to solve consumer challenges and fulfill people’s needs simply and efficiently throughout the entire customer journey.

Design is about thinking from the user’s perspective to understand the problem and come up with the answer. Hence, you can achieve a thriving design culture when every employee starts thinking from the customer’s point of view and adopts a problem-solving attitude. Whether it’s design staff, leaders, or overall employee belief in the value of design, all are essential components.

Sharing the feelings and perspectives of other people

One of the core principles of adopting a problem-solving attitude is empathy, the ability to understand and share the feelings and perspectives of other people. By encouraging empathy within an organization, design thinking helps create a culture that prioritizes the needs and experiences of customers, employees, and other stakeholders.

This user-centric approach leads to better products, services, and processes that genuinely resonate with the people you are designing them for and, as such, generates greater faith, loyalty, devotion, and even prestigious Red Dot Design Awards!

Giving employees the freedom to thrive in their job

Paramount is building a design-driven culture where employees are free to thrive doing what they do best while solving problems collaboratively. If encouraged and nurtured, fostering a design culture can lead to happier, more fulfilled, forward-thinking employees and a healthier business turnover.

According to a study by the leading research and advisory firm Forrester Research Consulting, most companies with a design-driven culture achieve tangible business benefits, making them stronger and more resilient from both an internal and external perspective and more likely to innovate within their field. 

In a design-driven company, design permeates all business touchpoints, from the shop floor to the CEO. It’s embedded in every department, creating an ambition among employees to constantly improve.

Continuous improvement leads to substantial change

A great example is how Japanese multinational automotive manufacturer Toyota Motor Corporation incorporates an equivalent practice into everything it does. Design culture has been the cornerstone of Toyota’s management philosophy for decades through a concept it calls “Kaizen.”

“Kaizen” translates as “Kai” (change) and “zen” (good), loosely meaning “change for the better.” Toyota bases its Kaizen approach on the belief that continuous, incremental improvement leads to substantial change over time. It says you can celebrate yesterday’s achievements, but there’s no resting place because “the best never rest!” It’s a guide to finding new ways to improve.

Being more inspired at work while inspiring your colleagues

In essence, Kaizen is the practice of small, steady steps. It refers to activities that continuously improve all company functions and involve everyone throughout the organization. Kaizen stands for continuous improvement, implementation, quality, advancement, and success.

Design cultures like Kaizen involve people becoming more inspired at work and, in turn, inspiring their colleagues and customers via attributes such as freedom of speech, trust, respect, inclusion, flexibility, engagement, and empowerment. Most importantly, they encompass purpose. In other words, why you do what you do.

Why some organizations are more innovative than others

In his brilliant New York Times best-selling book, “Start With Why,” author and inspirational speaker Simon Sinek asks two fundamental questions. “Why are some people and organizations more innovative, influential, and profitable than others? Why do some command greater loyalty from customers and employees alike?”

He goes on to say that inspirational figures like Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, and the Wright Brothers had little in common, but they all started with “WHY.” They realized that people won’t truly buy into a product, service, movement, or idea until they understand the WHY behind it. Understanding the WHY continuously powers the best and most reputable companies to meet their customers’ expectations and needs while simultaneously realizing their own. Think of it as a company’s North Star—your guiding light!

Making video meetings simple, seamless, and productive

At Neat, the WHY is because we want to make video meetings as simple, seamless, and productive as possible. Since establishing the company in Oslo in 2019, we’ve repeatedly strived to build beautifully simple video devices, experiences, and services that generate genuine customer value and solve real problems for people.

Being a design-driven company empowers us to place design and the WHY at the heart of everything Neat does. It includes how we visualize, design, and develop our video devices, experiences, and services and how simple it is to install, set up, use, and manage them. It also includes how quickly and efficiently we can ship them globally within days, whether in small batches or larger deployments. 

Designing everything with conciderable care and attention

Equally important is how we relate to, communicate with, and help you, our customers. Everything matters: the design and function of our website, blogs, newsletters, product and feature materials, the look and feel of our video clips, and how people experience unboxing our devices and other products—even the “Designed in Oslo, Norway” wording on our packaging serves a purpose.

Every need and nuance has been thoroughly thought through and designed with considerable care and attention as we repeatedly iterate to improve every facet of Neat as we evolve.

Being among the world’s top video conferencing companies

In the six years that Neat has existed, we’ve brought innovative, game-changing video meeting solutions to the market, including our pioneering, patented Neat Symmetry, Neat Boundary, and revolutionary Neat App Hub, to name but a few. 

Perhaps that’s why industry analysts Frost & Sullivan recently positioned Neat among the world’s top video conferencing companies and showed how we’re poised and ready for growth through rapid innovation in their report, Meeting Room Video Conferencing Devices, 2024: A Benchmarking System to Spark Companies to Action – Innovation That Fuels New Deal Flow and Growth Pipelines.

Not bad for a disruptive, determined, design-driven six-year old, eh?!

See our pioneering devices live in action during our Virtual Demo, Neat Devices and Experiences. For a one-on-one experience, book a demo with a Neat product specialist.