Data Drives Redesign of Architecture Firm’s Santa Clara Office

There’s no one-size-fits-all model for how a company should structure its workspace, set up its teams or foster engagement and productivity.

California architecture firm One Workplace, which advises clients on workplace design and construction, believes that for employees to be productive, they need to be empowered. This means embracing individualism, and giving workers the ability to control their work environment by providing functional and versatile spaces throughout the office, as well as work remotely.

But as it looked around its Santa Clara office, which was starting to feel cramped as the headcount rapidly grew, One Workplace realized it wasn’t utilizing the advice it offered clients about office design. After five years in the space, the firm embarked on a renovation that not only changed how the space looked and functioned, but created an entirely new approach to work for the firm’s employees.

With around 250 people working in the 38,000-square-foot space and the number of employees continually growing (the headcount had nearly doubled since the firm moved into the location in 2013), the firm was running out of room for desks when it decided to renovate the office three years ago.

“It was the whole reason we were going to tear down a wall and spread out,” said Christopher Good, creative director at One Workplace, referencing the plan to expand into 130,000 square feet of adjacent, unoccupied warehouse space surrounding the building.

Before committing to any decisions, the architecture firm decided to get some insight into how it was really using its current space. They installed occupancy sensors, provided by SteelCase, which measured where employees were sitting during the workday and for how long.

“Turns out we were not using our space very effectively or efficiently at all,” he said. “When the data came back, it showed that employees were only sitting at their [assigned] desks around 28% of the time.”

Instead, the staff was craving a more flexible way to work, often working remotely from home or elsewhere, taking phone calls outside or looking for space within the office to collaborate, which was limited.

“It was hard for us to find space to expand because so much of the office was taken up by desks — but those desks were occupied by people’s stuff, not by actual people,” said Good. “At that point, we realized it was not worth the $1 million it would take to reclaim and condition [the adjacent] spaces to add more workspace that would just sit unused. Instead, we would need to think about an entirely new way of work. One that involves a high degree of shared workspace and promotes a lot of flexible offerings.”

Good and his team also didn’t want “clocking in” at an assigned desk every day to be the primary work experience for a majority of the company’s employees.

“They shouldn't be coming in to sit at a desk and be counted,” he said. “They should come to work because of a host of other really important experiences that are not offered at home — [offices should have] places to collaborate with peers, focus spaces, really great rejuvenation spaces [and be] a place to connect with colleagues both virtually and physically.”

But of course, assigned desks do make sense for some departments. The solution was to adopt a neighborhood approach to the office layout, where the space was divided into zones that are conducive to each business unit’s specific type of work and needs.

“We did behavior analysis of our employees and found that certain business functions were more likely to adapt a flexible, agile and distributed team mode better than others,” Good described. “So, our sales team, our design team and some of our leadership group, for example, are highly flexible workers who don't need a lot of tools that specifically exist at their work location.”

For example, he continued, the sales team, which is often on calls or away at client meetings, might be assigned two desks per ten employees with a larger number of alternative or collaborative spaces to get work done. Alternatively, the HR or finance departments required assigned desks and offices or enclosed rooms, as they need access to specific software programs on their computers and often deal with sensitive or confidential information.

Each neighborhood takes certain factors into account for each department and provides them with specific features based on their needs, focusing on space to perform tasks, connect and collaborate and offers access to tech functionalities, like power outlets, lighting and audio-visual components for virtual meetings. Storage needs are also accounted for, including everything from short-term storage such as day lockers to keep a purse or bag, to more long-term solutions like file cabinets and bookshelves.

All neighborhoods have community space to gather and interact with adjacent neighborhoods. “Kind of like front porches,” Good said.

The approach has worked, and One Workplace has the numbers to back it up.

“We have about 400 employees reporting to the Santa Clara location, but we only built 175 desks. Then there are the ancillary experiences — huddle, focus and collaboration rooms, social gathering spaces, libraries and studies and a whole host of other sorts of settings,” Good described. “Before the remodel, we had about 29% occupancy at desks. Before the pandemic, we were up to 50% occupancy at those unassigned desks.”

The idea of enjoying the comforts of home while at work inspired much of the office’s design, with residential trends permeating the space, including soft colors, warm textures and a welcoming ambiance that made employees feel like they belonged, said Good.

“Our organization employs about 1,000 people across eight locations on the West Coast, but we’re still a family-owned business. The blend between work and home life and the importance of the family experience is a big deal in our company culture,” he said. “So, finding a way to tell that story in our offices was very important to us.”

The sentiment was evident when the designers collected qualitative feedback to accompany the hard data it was gathering.

“We asked everyone what their favorite place in the building was. Everyone chose the same spot, which was a kind of indoor-outdoor space off the main entry that featured a porch swing. It was like a living room,” said Good. But the occupancy data showed no one was actually sitting there.

When asked to describe why this unused space was an employee favorite, Good said respondents noted that every time they saw the space “it reminded them of why we do what we do; the people we work for, the family connections of the organization and the benefits of wellness and outdoor living. It reflected what that space culturally meant for who we are as an organization.”

But, Good joked, no one wants to sit on a two-person porch swing with their coworker, so the team had to figure out how to keep that emotional feeling the space evoked, while actually making it a functional place to get work done.

“We learned so much about the fact that the physical spaces we create shape peoples’ experience, both physically in how they function in a certain way, but also emotionally in the way they tell a story. The challenge we then had to solve for is, how do we do both?” said Good. “You can’t afford to keep real estate that just tells a wonderful story but that people don’t use, so how do you improve those spaces and make them ones that do both?”

The team found its answer in the office’s loft, a comfortable setting that both increased the building footprint and gives employees myriad options of workspace.

With high-bay ceilings in the warehouse-style office, the designers decided to utilize the unclaimed real estate above their heads in their own space, rather than taking on the adjacent building — instead of expanding outward, they elevated upward.

A focal point of the office, the library-inspired loft serves as a quiet focus space for employees with unassigned workstations, lounge furniture, some conference and meeting space and seven individual phonebooth-style areas for concentration or calls.

Beyond its striking appearance, an important part of the loft is the storytelling One Workplace has done around it as it promotes a new way of working, making the loft space an unspoken symbol of productivity within the office.

“When someone goes up to the loft, everyone can see them up there, and it’s a visual signal that says they have their head down trying to get work done,” said Good. “Based on the protocols we have set around that space, it’s a sign within the office for everyone else not to bother that person, not to call or text them, because they’re up there for a reason. It creates a visual connection with your coworkers that you are requesting uninterrupted time to focus.”

Careful attention had to be paid to the construction of the loft, as the office is located in a seismic zone. Together with One Workplace’s subsidiary commercial interior construction company Vantis and Calgary, Canada-based DIRTT, which specializes in prefabricated timber construction, the team built a computer-engineered timber loft.

The technology also allowed for the design of the loft to be sturdy and structurally viable for the geography, while still offering large expanses of space underneath that aren’t interrupted by beams or supports — up to 30 feet in some spans, according to Good — meaning the team could build out additional workspaces underneath the loft too.

At the time, the loft was the first multi-story structural timber system to be approved and built in California using the new technology. The process involved a lot of collaboration with building officials through the permitting process to greenlight the construction.

Good said the decision to utilize the vertical space instead of building out into the warehouse wasn’t necessarily a cost-saving measure when it came to the project as a whole, but did pay off.

“What it did allow us to do was spend the money where we really needed to spend it. So instead of spending it on expanding our footprint for the sake of it and reconditioning all the extra space, we could instead use it to focus on building both the loft space and building out and enhancing all of those specialty spaces and experiences our employees wanted. We were able to put the money to better use in different places.”

When the pandemic hit, nearly all of the U.S. corporate workforce was thrown into a flexible working arrangement focused on remote work.

Many speculated that the hot desk, which had gained popularity as a staple of the coworking model and was emerging in traditional office spaces, would see the end of its era due to the coronavirus, as employees who did come to work in person would not want to sit at a desk that someone else had previously used. But for Good, who notes that all One Workplace offices across the West Coast use a hot desk model, “shared desking is more important than ever.”

“If individuals are working in a more distributed way, like working at home part of the time or in a different office location part of the time and coming in one or two days a week, it certainly does not make sense to go back to a world where that desk sits there unused for long periods of time,” he said. He noted, however, that this approach is accompanied by highly vigilant cleaning protocols for the work stations, including a reservation software that tracks and monitors desk use and removes a used desk from the available options until it has been cleaned.

“Now the question everyone is asking is, ‘what does our space need to do now so that people will want to come back?’ Not everybody's going to come back, but those who do are going to want something very different,” said Good. “So how do we help create that? How do we build that experience that's worth coming back to?”