Article: Designing Our Offices for Hybrid Work: What We Learned

For our new office in San Jose, California, we focused on three overarching goals:

1. Prioritize the employee experience to make the office an inspiring and desirable place to work. Ensure employees can be as effective and productive as possible.

2. Inspire teamwork, enabling employees to collaborate without friction, particularly with those in offices around the globe.

3. Embrace flexibility, enabling us to adjust to changes in workforce size and meeting room needs as they arise. We also wanted the flexibility to host onsite events.

We used learnings and data from recent redesigns of our offices in Lausanne, Switzerland, and Cork, Ireland to inform the San Jose approach. We looked at data and insights from actual office usage in these locations and examined employee behavior to guide our decision-making.

In addition to optimizing meeting rooms, we became early adopters of our own flex desking products. This included Logi Dock Flex and our new Logitech desk booking software service.

The inclusion of social network features in the desk booking software makes it easy for employees to notify coworkers about their plans to be in the office, so they can coordinate sitting together. Not surprisingly, people are more inclined to come to the office when coworkers will also be present.

The hardware/software combination of Logi Dock Flex and desk booking software allows employees to select a desk based on location or proximity to teammates and check in effortlessly when they arrive at the office by attaching their laptop with a USB-C cable. This provides us with the actual usage data, which we capture in Sync. And, as with meeting room data, we mine the data (actual check-ins rather than bookings) to look for trends that inform our future workspace strategy.

Looking Forward

Is our approach working? Well, it’s too early to tell. 

We continue to be our own “living lab,” learning as we go and adjusting to a changing work landscape.

We’re deploying new office technologies and video conferencing quickly, with minimal time and effort. We modify meeting rooms as needed, and convert banks of desks into meeting spaces and vice-versa as we learn how employees use the space. And we’re using insights from Sync to guide our decisions.

So here are our eight key takeaways for designing the office for hybrid and optimizing the employee experience:

1. Adopt an agile mindset, experimenting, testing and learning as you go

2. Leverage technology for data-driven insights

3. Assume most spaces will be used for video calls, and plan accordingly

4. Align workplace services and IT early in the process

5. Build in flexibility where possible, making the rooms easy to modify so that as you uncover new insights, you can change meeting room configurations

6. Base decisions on usage data rather than booking data

7. Remove friction and enable employees to flow easily from home to office with desk booking software

8. Embrace the adventure!

If you find yourself navigating the complexities of hybrid design, we'd love to connect. Feel free to reach out and consider joining us for a tour of Logitech's San Jose office. Our journey is a work in progress, and we’d love to exchange insights. 

Learn more about Sync insights in this article.