Microsoft Evolves its Workplace Strategy for Employee Experience

What is the most critical element of a functional workplace? Beauty and space are important. But recently, Microsoft has learned that creating the right balance of human energy in a space is most important. That is, creating a space that works for how people really use it. We call this critical standard employee experience, and over the past few years it has become the No.1 element we design for across our global portfolio.

As is widely known, recent years have seen a revolution in workplace norms. Advances in communications and collaboration technologies like SharePoint, Skype, Teams, and Office 365, along with hardware like more powerful laptops and smartphones, are allowing employees to define “workplace” much more broadly than a given space in a particular building.

In response, creating built environments to support this new employee flexibility has become a key priority for Microsoft’s real estate group. And it’s a critical one to get right. Our experience has taught us that if you get the space wrong in either direction, community feeling deteriorates. If a space is overpopulated, it’s chaotic, with focus and concentration negatively impacted. If it’s underpopulated, it’s a ghost town. By contrast, our research shows, achieving the right density in team spaces fosters collaboration, increasing team effectiveness and speed of decision making. Achieving the right balance is the key.

So, we developed an internal tool which allows us to actively see the utilization of every site across our 45-million-square-foot portfolio. In the past, the only way to gather information about employee space usage was to flood buildings with sensors, which starts to get very expensive in large corporate portfolios. Instead, space utilization data can come from technologies most companies already have in place: an internet connection; a wireless infrastructure; a security system; an application with data on employee names and organizational affiliation; and a building management system that knows how many employees are assigned to a space.

From the moment an employee swipes a security badge to enter a building, the data gathering begins. Through an intricate choreography involving the cloud, machine learning, analytics, and sociometric data, that employee’s phone and other devices connect to the network again and again, providing multiple data points on which spaces are being used and for how long. Privacy, of course, is a real concern which we protect in alignment with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), by de-identifying harvested data so that no connection can be made between devices and individuals. The Microsoft Azure cloud processes the data, which over time enables a more precise overview of building usage than any other method to date.

The minute all this data is amassed, “space-per-head” goes obsolete as a metric for space planning decisions, leaving much more meaningful information to dictate space usage. For instance, the data showed us  we’d been building our workplaces an average of 20 percent larger than necessary.

We identified many examples of energy that was out of balance within a space. Employees are interacting in smaller groups, and more frequently throughout the day than we’d planned for. Only .5 percent of conference room meetings are physically attended by 10 or more people, and 50 percent of them are physically attended by just one person. Groups we assumed spend more time in the office, like administrative professionals, in fact maintain work habits nearly as mobile as salespeople. Again, and again, data has revealed that spaces designed for one purpose are being used for another, such as social space being appropriated as meeting space, or an office becoming a quiet zone.

Mostly, we learned that using data to design spaces is good for employees, allowing us to transcend cookie-cutter approaches to deliver unique user experiences based on quantifiable user behavior. At the recently opened Microsoft Dublin, several distinct employee groups cohabit a single building. Data revealed organic collaboration thrived in open spaces, so the building was designed with large community areas and no offices. The vibe there is energized and lively: A working space that works for all.

That’s why data driven design is so critical and it’s why Microsoft is investing in the cloud, AI, and IoT platform to enable partners to build their own space utilization tools. Spatial intelligence features are built into the Azure Digital Twins platform, which launched in public preview this month.

Data driven space utilization empowers companies to operate with optimal fiscal prudence. But employee experience proves a much more compelling reason. Individuals do their best work in different ways, and only when we know how they’re choosing to do it can we optimize it with design.