An experiment in light expression

Manu Sharma has a great blog post on how Apple’s employee badges were designed to be as distinct as the products the company designs. The post is a good reminder that all great design outcomes are a result of multiple forces at play: Executive management sensitivity, a respect for individuality, an aesthetic grounding across the company, and a VERY user centered design process (not a reactive usability engineering process).

Here are some of my observations from the field in India’s technology sector. While an employee badge is the least of ‘motivators’, in the true Chinese tradition of starting every journey with a small step, it is a great starting point. A new employee is uncertain about many many things when they join a company. A well designed ob-boarding process, and certainly a well designed badge essentially says to the employee ‘There’s some thought behind things here’.

And here’s where most Indian companies get it wrong.

Several companies in the Indian IT industry follow the lowest common denominator to employee badges. Most badges are printed on cheap plastic, with even cheaper plastic covers, use employee-submitted dull ‘passport’ photographs, and include as Manu points out, all sorts of extraneous information. The result is depressing looking employee badges that give no sense of pride, no sense of inspiration, and certainly no sense of differentiation in an extremely commoditized marketplace. And then companies complain about employee loyalty! I suspect the reason for this is not only costs, but also that it gets outsourced to a Security setup which has no stake in employee satisfaction, only in workplace safety. It gets worse. Since almost everybody in Bangalore wears some kind of collar tag, all the way from BPO executives, office boys, Citibank sales drones standing outside ATMs and airports, to just about anybody and everybody, an employee of a company with a black, or red, or blue collar tag has a thousand other people in the city wearing the same tag.
Here is my wishlist for a GOOD employee badge:

1. Some customization on shape
2. Change your own pictures
3. Bright and cheerful

4. Some metal, not all plastic

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