Workplace As Town
How can experiential aspects bolster planning imperatives to promote a sense of community at work? Zendesk’s new APAC headquarters in Singapore have been modelled on a European town and offer a rich variety of experiences.
Taking up 50,000 square feet over one and a half floors in Marina One West Tower, the new regional headquarters of software company Zendesk have been designed by M Moser Associates in collaboration with Zendesk’s in-house creative team. The vision was to create a workplace that fosters better social connections and human relationships using the blueprint of a town as both a spatial and a social model.
“Our planning approach for each office is to create, in essence, a European town. In fact, Zendesk’s birthplace, Copenhagen, is always at the start of any design briefing,” says Raphael Güller, Zendesk’s Global Creative Director. “We like how these towns usually have a central square that’s the heart of public life and where people go to connect. We put these spaces at the entrance, encouraging interaction and chance encounters.”
Zendesk has plans to double its product development and engineering teams over the next three years, while the office space itself has been designed to accommodate over 400 employees. It was also crucial that the workplace would provide for various levels of interaction and engagement, ranging from public and social spaces to more private settings where one can work with uninterrupted focus.
While business units and teams sit in assigned neighbourhoods, meeting and gathering spaces (with plenty of seating in styles ranging from bench and booth to sofa and spectator seats) are liberally distributed throughout the two floors of the office.
Says Matthew Burke, Director at M Moser Associates’ Singapore office, “Zendesk practises the one-to-one work seating arrangement, but we encourage movement through the space. So there are power points and seating just about everywhere.” Even the connection between the two floors provides for this, being less staircase than grandstand seating that terraces down to The Fountain – a reconfigurable multipurpose space that serves equally well as canteen and town hall venue.
A comprehensive suite of amenities – cafe, pantry, bar, library, phone booth, mother’s nursing room, and prayer and meditation room – allows the office to operate with a town-like self-sufficiency. In fact, with the inclusion of outdoor-like spaces within the office, there may no longer be the need to step out of the office, as it were. Materials such as terracotta and brick make you feel like you’re out in a patio, Burke suggests. The planter garden on level 10 not only brings in a slice of the outdoors; it is landscaped to feel like a park setting, complete with paved pathways and bench seating.
Beyond practical provisions, Burke says there was also an interest in integrating brand values and local identity, to have “that subtle overlay of culture, to represent global and local values” in the spatial design. Singaporean artists Ripple Root were engaged to create artwork and murals, notably placed in Singapore-themed rooms (with names such as Getai and Durian).
Leroy Tan, the Workplace Experience Manager at Zendesk, observes that a popular space for staff to congregate during happy hour is a space named the Void Deck. This space features the familiar HDB void deck tables and was created as an unprogrammed space. The contents and activities of the space – from gaming consoles to bar menu – are all initiatives of Zendesk staff. Tan explains that this prompts a feeling of ownership of the space. He says, “We create that infrastructure. They bring in their ideas. It makes the space theirs.”