SPACES 4 THE FUTURE
No longer a cubicle, the office of the future is a seamless integration of work, play, and community – and it’s starting to happen now
The view from the windows of Prudential Singapore’s swanky new headquarters at Marina One could easily have come from some futuristic escapist fantasy. Marina Bay’s skyline, after all, is dotted with shiny new skyscrapers that could conceivably belong in a sci-fi movie.
Dubbing its new base the PRU Workplayce – emphasis on “play”– Prudential Singapore is taking its cue from Albert Einstein’s famous adage: “Play is the highest form of research.”
“We sort of drew on Einstein’s view that if people are having fun, if they’re feeling playful, then they are more likely to be creative,” says Wilf Blackburn, Prudential Singapore’s CEO. “The work we do is very serious and somehow to transform ourselves, improve our services, embrace digital, we need to re-imagine.”
And re-imagine they did, starting with the new headquarters. In designing the office, Prudential consulted with its youngest employees, who had very firm ideas of how they wanted their space to be. It’s a shrewd move considering that millennials, iGen, mGen and the generations after them will be populating these spaces in the future.
PRU Workplayce has flexible open spaces and startup-inspired collaborative areas where employees can choose the workspace that best suit their working styles and the tasks that they’re doing.
There’s a barista and pantry area that allow for more informal and social interaction. There are rest pods and relaxation nooks for those who want to take a quick nap or recharge. Meeting spaces are not just rooms with four walls. They’re immersive to encourage outof-the-box thinking and generation of ideas, while an amphitheatre and lounge essentially breaks down silos and hierarchy so that everyone starts off on a more equal footing.
“The only people who have desks are the receptionists and the PAs,” says Mr. Blackburn. “Depending on who I’m working with, I can be working on something with junior people or heads of department and the next day, just move around, depending on what I’m doing.”
To be sure, open-plan isn’t a new concept in the workspace – it has existed since the 1950s – nor is integrating work and play a new idea. Tech companies have been ahead of the curve, as always. Facebook and Google have offices that are the envy of employees everywhere. Apple’s new headquarters in Cupertino, reportedly built for a cool $5 billion, is a four-storey circular building that calls to mind the dial of an iPod and is roughly the same size as the Pentagon. For sure, the interiors will be nothing short of spectacular – the brief for the wood to be used is said to run to 30 pages.
But perhaps when an insurance company such as Prudential starts rethinking and retooling its workspace to be more in tune with existing realities and possibly getting a jump on the future, it is time to think about how the workspace or office will evolve into, what it will look like, how it will function.