Interior design – building the future together with Nornickel
The Shared Service Centre (SSC) is a new division of Norilsk Nickel, located in Saratov and handling the support processes of the parent company.
The SSC was a significant step towards greater efficiency in Nornickel’s financial management, IT infrastructure maintenance and HR administration. For the first time in the company’s history, all support processes were brought together in a single office.
By the time we joined the project, the interior design was already complete, but it did not fully comply with the company’s brand book, nor did it deliver on the employer branding objectives.
In this case study, we share how the result turned out.
Clarity, comprehensibility and consistency with the overall aesthetic line of “Norilsk Nickel” – these were the key requirements for creating an environment that would motivate employees and visitors to adopt a business-like approach and raise their level of competence. In addition, shortly before approaching Brandson, the parent company had undergone a rebranding, and the new style had to be integrated into the office interior.
Thanks to the SSC, the group’s enterprises are able to:
- Speed up management decision-making;
- Receive comprehensive services that create additional value for the business;
- Reduce the cost of maintaining support functions.
The concepts we proposed had to solve three tasks at once:
- Show SSC employees their importance to “Norilsk Nickel” and their role in solving the company’s tasks;
- Comply with the company’s brand book;
- Fit unobtrusively and concisely into the interior of the new office without distracting from work.
In the course of the project an additional circumstance arose: the SSC was growing so rapidly that departmental relocations inevitably became a regular occurrence. This presented us with an additional task: to forgo wayfinding and instead zone the space so that the texts placed on the surfaces matched the function of the department and remained appropriate whenever the function of that room changed.
The interior of the Shared Service Centre had to demonstrate a profound approach to work efficiency while at the same time being friendly to the user. The agency’s specialists developed the concept “Professionalism in Everything”, highlighting the qualities shared by all SSC employees.
A true professional performs complex specialised work systematically, efficiently and reliably in the most varied conditions, with a high degree of precision and responsibility, and on time.
To bring to life the universally recognised understanding of coordination and efficiency, we used a concise, functional style.
Simple geometric shapes and clear outlines evoke diagrams, blueprints and technical illustrations. There is not a single superfluous element; the message of the images is as transparent as possible. Compact graphics stand in opposition to decorativeness, demonstrating the pragmatic style characteristic of a self-assured specialist.
The diagrams are complemented by copy that emphasises the corporate values of the Shared Service Centre. Without the successful work of the SSC, “Nornickel” would be unable to carry out its core business and would stop like an unwound clock, which is why the verbal message appeals first and foremost to employees’ personal responsibility and their influence on the development of the company as a whole. Each phrase is placed in the interior with a specific purpose: to create a working atmosphere in which every team member gladly immerses themselves in perfectly tuned team processes.
We also specially designed a map of Russia showing the geographic footprint of “Norilsk Nickel”. Several different solutions were chosen to visualise the ideas: images, three-dimensional images and a string-art collage.
