This week we’re in Romania, talking with our partner Morphoza. Based in Cluj-Napoca, the company designs, builds and furnishes inspiring interiors for innovative office environments and unique retail spaces. The expertise ranges from interior architecture and design to project management, supporting the client from beginning to end.
We interviewed Diana Calfa, Creative Strategist & Founder of Morphoza and Partner at Trust2Work.
1. What makes Morphoza different in designing workplaces and breakout areas?
We believe that the world would be a better place if people would live and work in spaces that not only host their activities, but also express their nature and passions. Design should invite people in, comfort their needs and help them achieve even the boldest dreams they dare to have.
We put people first.
And then, we focus on the space. For more than 15 years, we deliver spaces that inspire, promote a sense of wellbeing and enable people to achieve their best performance at work.
Our mission is to offer to our clients’ employees the right workspace – one that empowers them in their day-to-day work and supports all types of work within the company and one that takes account of their needs, expectations and vision – and we do that by engaging them in designing their own office. This approach helps us generate valuable ideas from within our clients’ teams, keep everyone involved during the entire project and come up with an interior design concept that is personal and tells their unique story.
2. Morphoza and Emmegi have a long partnership and they have been cooperating in many successful projects. What are the advantages of partnering with Emmegi?
The success of every daring interior design project we undertake relies on both the creativity of our team and the quality, variety and aesthetics of the products we are choosing in order to bring our ideas to life. And when it comes to reliable products with a modern design and a high degree of functionality, we can always count on Emmegi. Professionalism, promptitude and constant support are only a few of the advantages of partnering with Emmegi. It is important for us to have by our side partners that share our vision, help us promptly deliver the best quality products to our clients and always keep their promises – and we are proud that Emmegi is one of them and has been our trustful partner for more than ten years.
3. The behavior and the needs of the people are redefining the role of the workplaces today. How do architects and interior designers may facilitate a positive reply to this change?
Well, change is never an easy pill to swallow. But adapting to it is the key in succeeding not only in the business context, but in life in general. So, I think the first step in achieving a positive reply to it consists mainly in shifting our perspectives and not focusing on the obstacle, but on the opportunities that change always brings.
While this perspective shift depends mostly on each and every one of us, our environment also plays an important part in helping us build this positive mindset. And now let’s take the offices, as an example. They are no longer spaces where people go to in order to perform their daily tasks. The pandemic changed that indefinitely. It showed us that people can effectively work from anywhere, which made us wonder why should we go back to the office? What could it offer more to us? And the answer is EXPERIENCE.
So this is where architects and interior designers come in. We know that productivity and morale are heavily influenced by office design. In order to generate a positive reaction towards the new ways of working and, ultimately, employee satisfaction, the process of design should be less about the space and more about the people. More focused on how it makes them feel and how could it provide a great experience for them everyday. Or, in one word, more agile.
Offices designed to support an agile and activity based working style offer a variety of spaces that encourage ad-hoc meetings between team members, exchanges of ideas, spaces dedicated to teamwork, social spaces that support informal interactions, but also spaces adapted to the work processes in the organization: spaces for concentrated work, rooms for brainstorming or equipped to host virtual conferences, spaces for experiments or product presentations. Giving the employees the possibility to choose the perfect place for a certain task they need to perform empowers them to build a sense of comfort, freedom and enjoyment for being in the office everyday.
4. We are living in challenging times. What are the keys for Morphoza to be proactive and successful in the present market?
We love a good challenge. With an experience of over 15 years on the market, we managed to overcome many challenging times, which only helped us become more competitive, creative, adaptable and innovative. And the latest crisis was no different. In fact, we used it as an opportunity to rethink and expand our range of services.
The lockdown didn’t slow us down. On the contrary. We used that time in order to streamline our internal procedures so that, after this period, we would be able to respond faster to the market challenges.
Also, we realized that this was the time for us to use our knowledge and expertise in order to help other companies get prepared for the new reality and make the most out of it. Therefore, we took our experience of three years in organizational transformation and concentrated it into a tailor-made change management concept that we called Trust2Work – a workspace consultancy tool that delivers workplace strategies and processes to help clients maximize their real estate portfolio, align their stakeholders, transform their spaces and create great experiences at work. We strongly believe that, especially now – in the post-pandemic era – an efficient change management tool, like Trust2Work, will become crucial for the organizations.
Courtesy of Bosch Engineering Center Cluj
