Workplace Design Guidelines: Designing & defining employee experience

intro

This confidential tech client is a mission-driven company that provides a payroll, benefits, and HR platform for more than 60,000 small and medium-sized businesses.

Following the design of their co-headquartered offices at a historic San Francisco warehouse and in downtown Denver, my team helped develop a workplace design playbook to explain in detail the overall experience, strategic planning, and design decisions behind the company's office environments.

discovery

Facilitating Stakeholder Workshops

I co-led 6 different workshops with a team of 3 to engage the company's founders, department leaders, and other key staff to identify key insights around inclusive design, wellbeing, environmental impact, brand, employee experience, mobility, and privacy.

Gathering Employee Feedback

We then conducted two post-occupancy surveys in both the Denver and San Francisco offices to understand employee perceptions about the overall design of their offices, as well as environmental comfort, technology, and other operational needs.

Below is a snapshot of the Denver survey findings, which showed a similar result as the SF survey, but with more detailed insights about each of the separate buildings.

info gathering

Gathering content & environmental specifications to inform the guidelines

We worked with our interior design team, internal client teams, and various external consultants to gather and synthesize all relevant materials to designing our client's workplace environments.

final playbook

These workplace guidelines will help both internal and external design teams understand and implement the client’s desired employee experience in future offices. The living document is intended to help designers consider locational factors, evolution of company culture, and the client's fluid approach to brand, look & feel, and furniture.

Below are select pages to showcase the overall structure and organization of content within the 80-page playbook.