Setting A Benchmark
How do you design for speed and agility for thousands of employees? Gensler finds the right balance of technology, way finding, density and user experience at the Singapore headquarters of HP Inc.
Hewlett Packard was part of the first wave of multinational companies to invest in Singapore following the nation’s independence. The company established its presence here in 1970, operating from several locations across the island. In 2013, planning began for a consolidated Singapore headquarters to house HP’s various operations under one roof.
Relocating thousands of employees from several places, housing them in one venue and making sure everybody would be able to work properly was already a massive task. Adding another layer of complexity was HP Global’s decision to split itself into two separate business entities – HP Inc. (HP) and HP Enterprises (HPE) – in
2015. This was a strategic decision to allow better navigation of today’s market.
Completed in 2017, the architectural shell of the new headquarters in fact comprises two office buildings constructed by Mapletree on the site of HP’s former factory cluster. The Green Mark Platinumrated buildings were designed to house facilities for manufacturing, product and software development, customer service and offices.
HP occupies the entirety of one building (the eight-storey Block 1A) and shares another (the 11-storey Block 1) with HPE. The move to the new headquarters was an opportunity to tailor the workplace from scratch to suit current and future employees, and update the work environment with the latest tools and technology. Tasked to design the interior of the 45,000 square metres of office space, supporting facilities and amenities for HP was workplace specialist Gensler.
“The HP brand culture that we wanted to portray in the new workplace was centred around speed, agility and forward thinking,” says Angela Spathonis, Studio Director and Senior Associate at Gensler Singapore office who helmed the project. This brand culture is reflected by both the workplace design and the workplace strategy.
HP adopts a hybrid activity-based working (ABW) system. Barring specialised engineering work that requires specific settings and machinery, employees are free to move around and change work locations throughout the day.
“We expected to see more people wanting different types of spaces, so we made it possible to hack the environment and swap out those single work points for other settings,” says Spathonis. The floors are raised to accommodate under-floor trunking, and the various collaboration set-ups are fully wired so employees need only plug and play. “Power sockets and PC displays are a must in our collaboration areas. This gives our colleagues the flexibility and mobility to do work and be productive wherever they want to,” adds Sowjanya Reddy, Regional head of HR, Asia-Pacific & Japan, HP Inc.
Wayfinding is crucial as the floor plates are enormous, each sprawling across 3,800 to 5,600 square metres. Gensler divided the interior into smaller neighbourhoods comprising varied settings that cater to different work modes. Colours, textures and environmental graphics work in tandem to point one in the right direction.
“The HP campus is designed to provide a conducive environment for face-to-face collaboration: from pods for two to three individuals to dining tables with monitors from which colleagues and meet and present,” says Reddy. The collaboration hub on each floor takes the form of a café with various seating arrangements, from a solo chair with a coffee table to secluded booths with a skyline view. Infusing the interior with a local flavour, Gensler assigned each floor a material palette inspired by a specific neighbourhood in Singapore.
With over 500 workstations on most of the floors, statistically these neighbourhoods are quite densely populated. “But when you walk through the space it doesn’t feel that way,” shares Spathonis. Indeed, there is plenty of room to move and each workstation, no matter how deeply positioned on the floor plate, is well lit. The interior is equipped with a smart, LEED-certified lighting system that automatically adjusts its intensity according the natural light outside.
And as flexibility has become a necessity in the age of disruption, Gensler has future-proofed the design by maximising its modularity. The footprint of various enclosed rooms is consistent, all the built zones are clustered in similar locations across floors, and loose collaborative settings were curated so they can be easily swapped in and out.
Spathonis shares that HP Singapore has set the benchmark for HP offices around the globe in part by showing that you don’t necessarily need to have a large footprint per person to have a comfortable working environment.