How to Create Company Signs for Your Employees’ Home Office

With hundreds of thousands of employees working from home due to the novel coronavirus, we’re noticing some trends in the “new normal”. Unfortunately, one of those is a feeling of isolation and disconnect – especially for new employees who have never met their coworkers in person or stepped foot in the office. It can be difficult to create a cohesive company culture when your team has become a square on a video conference call.

One of our solutions to this problem at Pinnacle Signs and Graphics? Custom signage. Creating custom business signs for your office employees can be a morale booster in multiple ways. Receiving a gift from the company is a delight all on its own, filling blank walls can serve as a visual boost in mood, and having a cohesive design can make employees and customers alike feel more professional and put together.

1. Cover White Walls With Branded Colors

No matter the design you choose, using branded colors can make the backgrounds of your Zoom calls feel much more cohesive and professional. The mind loves order and our eyes take in colors before almost anything else, so making sure that all of your employees have their video call walls covered in branded colors sends an unconscious message of order and belonging. This can make employees feel more bonded during otherwise impersonal feeling meetings, and it can also send a cohesive branding message to clients and vendors.

There are so many ways to accomplish this that we can hardly choose our favorite! Check out a few of our best ideas for business signs for your office walls:

  • Go with an abstract design that combines your company colors and send wall-paper sized vinyl graphics to your employees that they can just peel and stick onto the wall. This acts as a burst of attractive color while also allowing them to still anchor shelves or whiteboards or pictures over it and customize their wall.
  • Vinyl decals of the company logo in varying sizes allow your employees to choose how they want to brand their wall while still making them feel like part of a team.
  • Choose a variety of designs (flowers, shapes, patterns, etc.) and have them all done in your company colors, then allow your employees to choose which design they would prefer. This can create conversations (“Oh, we have the same design!” or “Oh, I love the flowers!”) and allow for individual preferences while still evoking a sense of cohesiveness through color.

2. Personalize Signage to Make it Feel Special and Inclusive

If you have a small team, personalization can be a fun way to make employees feel recognized and included while also helping them brand their company image. Using names, titles, favorite activities, favorite animals, etc. are all great ways to recognize individuality and make employees feel seen. This is equally (if not more) important in larger companies – but sometimes large scale customization can be cost-prohibitive.

  • Have individualized decals made of the person’s name and/or title to affix on their wall so it appears over their heads while you’re on video calls. Make sure it appears in company colors or has a logo included for visual branding.
  • Create introduction signs (especially helpful for employees with client calls on video) that can be framed in the shot. Thay can say “Ask me anything!” “Hi, I’m Mark!” “Dedicated Account Manager”, etc. You can also add little cutouts or decals that indicate the employee’s personality or hobbies (i.e. a football, a camera, a dog, etc.).
  • Have employees vote on their favorite version of the signage or wallpaper. This can make them feel involved and recognized even if you end up only going with one particular design.

3. Allow For Customization

While the ideas in this article are largely meant to address the problem of blank and boring walls that can feel like a negative reflection on employees and the company image, there are always those employees who have a perfectly designed background in their home office already. For these employees, it can feel like an invasion of privacy or like they’re giving you control over their personal home decor decisions.

For this reason, we suggest that you offer either a variety of branding options or signage and/or make compliance optional based on a case-by-case review. In general, these ideas are meant to be fun and make your employees feel like a part of the team, not like they’re losing control over yet another area of their lives during the pandemic.

You can also vary your design mandates by department. Leadership should always lead by example, so we suggest committing fully to whatever your new branding policy will be. For customer-facing roles, you may have to be more stringent than with internal teams. Your IT team may prefer the simplest solution, while Design may want to take some liberties.

Here are some of our suggestions for customizable home office signage:

  • Make a variety of signs, decals, and canvases or framed prints of the team, the office, the logo, your projects, etc. in your branded color scheme and have your employees make their own collage walls. (We highly suggest sending layout options as well for those less creatively inclined employees who would see this as an undue burden rather than a fun exercise.)
  • Have a variety of designs and options available ranging from a decal logo to full wallpaper sized appliques and let each employee choose their comfort level.
  • Let each department design their own signage in a way that makes sense for them.

No matter what option you go with, creating a visually branded look will help bring the team together and make your company culture feel a little more virtually vibrant. And physical backgrounds mean that you don’t have to worry about changing settings across video platforms! It will remain through technical glitches and switches between Zoom, FaceTime, Skype, and Google Meetings – no matter who you’re meeting with.

If you have questions about business signs for your office employees while they work from home, contact Pinnacle Signs and Graphics today! We’re happy to help make your idea a reality – or help you come up with a custom design!