Monday Mashup: L.L. Bean Encourages People to Be An Outsider at Work

What exactly do we mean by this? It's not what you think! It's better. For most office dwellers, their only connection to the outdoors during a workday is a view from a window or, at best, a lunch break spent in a park. This summer, along with the coworking space Industrious, L.L. Bean created a functioning outdoor workplace—complete with conference rooms, electrical outlets, and ergonomic furniture—that debuted in New York in June and then traveled to Boston, Philadelphia, and Madison, Wisconsin to encourage people to take their work outside. We love this idea!

The debut at New York's Madison Square Park featured modern office furniture set up in conference rooms, single desk areas, residential-style soft seating, and picnic benches, as well as an area for teambuilding activities. For a more quirky option, there was a pod of cycling desks. Anyone could book workspaces in advance online—the group spaces filled quickly—but walk-ups could check in with event staff to see if there was room for them.

Jack Morton Worldwide designed and produced the activation, which included fabricating the custom workspace pods in its Princeton, New Jersey, facility. Another partner on the campaign was workplace strategy expert Lee Stringer, who was brought on to help with research and lend her credibility to the notion that working outside does have positive benefits for both workers and their employers. In a national research study commissioned for the campaign, people who work traditional 9-to-5 jobs were asked whether they wanted to work outdoors (an overwhelming yes) and what was inhibiting them. The activation was designed to meet those needs, offering a place to plug laptops in or charge phones, as well as different seating areas.

At many consumer activations, the host brand's own employees don't get to experience the activities themselves. But in this case, they did. The set had a test run at L.L. Bean's headquarters in Freeport, Maine, where employees used their internal conference room booking program to reserve space.

Also in support of the campaign, on the day of the New York activation's debut, Jack Morton employees at offices in New York, Dubai, Hong Kong, Australia, and elsewhere shared images of themselves working outdoors.

We love the idea of integrating work with the outdoors! Take a lesson or two from L.L. Bean...get your employees to be outsiders while we still have a few weeks of summer left and devour the details of this creative movement!