The Flexible Workplace: Offices That Support How People Really Work

Microsoft employs a diverse group of talented people from all around the world, and each one has their own preferences for how they collaborate, focus, and recharge. One way we optimize their employee experience is to build flexible and varied workplaces that help, rather than hinder, their daily work.

Shifting fluidly between solo time and group work, people can move among places that suit them best throughout their day: focus rooms for up to five people, private phone nooks, team-specific neighborhoods, indoor and outdoor conference rooms, cafés and lounge hubs, and many other workplaces.

Each space is carefully designed for comfort and adaptability, and their variety has transformed the way our employees work. Having so many options fosters personal productivity, prompts greater collaboration, and gives people greater authority over their work experience.

Microsoft was one of the earliest adopters of hot-desking, in which employees can sit wherever they want. Over the years in our field sales offices, we have improved on this trend with zoned, fully networked spaces that support a wide range of work styles, tasks, and functions all in a flexible work environment that even managers work in.

Those who prefer a high degree of mobility, for example, can touch down anywhere in their building, to catch up on email between meetings or have coffee and exchange ideas with colleagues or customers. Those doing solo work can reserve a focus room or find areas with just the right amount of adjacent activity such as the energetic edges of common spaces, or completely removed from them.

Instead of large, echoing conference rooms, employees have access to numerous smaller, more relaxed collaboration spaces, each equipped with homelike furnishings and state-of-the-art A/V equipment. Many informal work areas also offer modular furniture, such as tables that can be fit together into ad hoc groupings when needed. 

Highly collaborative groups, such as R&D engineers and marketing teams, can turn to semi-private “team based space” that they can change to suit varying team sizes. Wheeled furniture, height-adjustable desks (for sitting or standing), and sometimes even mobile partitions free employees to reconfigure a room’s setup at a moment’s notice or when needed to work collaboratively on a project. 

A fundamental cultural vector is “One Microsoft,” so a flexible workplace must also encourage meet-ups with colleagues for collaboration and social recharge time. Secluded neighborhoods are placed in sight of open, high-circulation areas and workspaces, such as lounge hubs, cafés, central staircases and atriums, and along active “boulevards” that connect the spaces. These areas are usually flooded with daylight, have long sight lines, and are furnished with tables, sofas, chairs, and areas that motivate people to work together or alone.

Smaller but less perceptible workplace details do their part to support how employees really work. Special attention to managing acoustics, for example, keeps sound locally contained, so people can make calls, have meetings, brainstorm at a walk-by whiteboard, or hold a customer event in a downstairs venue without impacting others’ productivity. Ergonomic furnishings, wheelchair-height surfaces, and features for unimpeded navigability (such as textured floors and Braille signage) further ensure the whole building works equally well for everyone. 

This flexible and varied workplace approach is the latest iteration of a decades-long Microsoft initiative to explore and develop an “intelligent workplace” that empowers every person to do his or her best work. Each detail is informed by years of actual space-utilization data and onsite research into how space, furnishings, acoustics, and other features either support or hinder our particular employee work types.

These details all add up to workplaces that work on people’s behalf, where every person can find a spot that serves their personal workstyle and immediate purpose. Such workplaces amplify employee productivity, transform how they collaborate, and help them feel great about where and how they work.