In the middle of a never-ending pandemic disrupting our working habits, Vero is preparing to move into a new office in Bangkok. Despite bringing inconveniences onto our teams throughout lockdowns and restrictions, the situation has also allowed for long-hidden needs to emerge. Our new office – located in Amarin Tower, in the hyper-central Chidlom area – has been conceived to address the new paradigm.
We started by surveying our teams early on to anticipate their expectations about a new office. Here are our key learnings and what they entailed in our office design.
Our teams need facetime and solo time – Hybrid Work as the natural form.
Remote work has allowed team members to experience more autonomy, to develop frictionless processes, to eliminate micro-management by technological constraint. However, collaboration has a social component which constrained work-from-home rhythm has not allowed to flourish, despite our best efforts in organizing social events.
Our new office has been designed to maximize facetime opportunities as well as offer convenient workspaces for focused work. The layout offers 3 meeting rooms allowing up to 22 people to collaborate in an isolated space. Semi-private working areas allow for informal collaboration, welcoming up to 32 people to hang out. Finally, a desktop area offering 40 seats for departments & teams to settle is built as a central hub.
Our teams need structure and flexibility – Dynamic Office Zoning.
Embracing hybrid workflows, we have conceived the new office to welcome movement. As progress is embedded in our mission as a company, we focused on making workplace usage a personalized experience, not unlike the traffic seen in a university building for instance. People move from an area to another, switching between various types of interactions. They may come and go for specific needs. Our team members are encouraged to manage their time freely as long as they maintain sync with their team mates.
Following this logic, we have not assigned individual desks, but department and team areas instead, for each team to share and settle. The layout encourages shared usage within each area and active use of community spaces.
Our workplace is more than an office – Bring Work Home / Bring Life to Work Culture.
Last but not least, we’ve designed the new office taking into account that a great workplace is not just a well-rounded layout of chairs & desks between four walls. A great workplace is a seamless and healthy environment throughout a team member’s work experience.
For that reason, we have launched several Culture programs to sustain new habits, which would make our team member’s work life balance better. We started rolling-out Work-From-Home upgrade budgets to make sure work can be done from home or remotely efficiently. We started elevating onboarding processes with further one-on-one support for new joiners. We started encouraging social initiatives & sharing practices: we gather our teams around Sessions that can be joined from wherever while opening our doors to our network of experts & opinion leaders. We have extended weekends while maintaining client service continuity.
In full operation, our “Supercampus” extends beyond the borders and engages our team members across locations and cultures. It is the backbone of our growing hybrid work culture.
Supercampus – Perspectives around the concept.
Studying further reports about Gen Z workplace demands, we have also recently realized the discontinued experience that young professionals go through. Most of them may come from universities where learning, collaborating, growing are the key priorities, and university life is designed accordingly. Spaces are diverse, movement is continuous, resources are aplenty. When moving to professional life, they usually find static offices, where economy of means seems to be the key priority.
While rethinking our office design, we looked at that university example. As a progressive workplace, don’t we also aspire to offer learning, collaborating and growing as the key drivers of the experience for our team members?
This is why we call our new idea of a Vero office: Supercampus. A place where ambitious, talented minds can develop projects collaboratively, mutualize their efforts and deliver outstanding work, while enjoying the experience.
What universities have, which we may not have built yet is a library. This might well be our next workplace project, at Vero. Do stay tuned to hear more about the experience of working at Vero!
