"ServiceScape" - Creating an Environment that Speaks for Itself by Rose Green

Sometimes we read something and forget it pretty quickly.   Sometimes we read something and it changes everything.   A couple of years ago, I stumbled across an article by Mary Jo Bitner called 'Servicescapes: the impact of physical surroundings on customers and employees' that, most definitely, falls into the latter category.   Physical environments, she suggests, can be silent communicators; and what they communicate is how an organisation views itself. In discussing 'servicescapes', Bitner is referring to places where services of a commercial nature are both produced and consumed - a dry cleaners, for example, or a post office.   However, for a church that runs a number of religious services but also provides a multi-purpose, multi-functional space for community use, the variety of services that might be on offer is almost infinite. The servicescape provides an environment where producers and consumers can interact.  

People can often have an emotional response to a place and this is transferred to the people they associate with it.   Where the space is well laid out, carefully balancing the needs of each group against the other, the interactions and responses are positive and the organisation benefits.  

Of course, the reverse is also true. Such things as temperature and smells, the decor and layout of furniture, functional objects and literature, can all enhance or detract from the environment.  The servicescape thus comes to represent the organisation in a visitor's mind.   It can signal how the organisation views itself and if the organisation has never thought about its servicescape, this may translate as a lack of caring for itself. For St Bride's, thinking about servicescape is not just about replacing the carpet or how we arrange the chairs on a Sunday morning.  

The servicescape represents us, the people who make up the organisation, to visitors, whether it's their first visit or their fiftieth.   The question is, how do we want to present ourselves?