Microsoft Global Workplace Investments

Workplace design influences much more than employee productivity. It reflects the company brand and shapes the employee experience, which can influence company culture, customer service and product development. A well-designed workplace puts the employee experience at the center, responding to the ways people collaborate and work. Intelligent spaces, using the latest technologies to anticipate employee needs while creating connections to nature and fostering a sense of community. This is our vision of Microsoft’s global workplace.

Our global real estate team has projects in Hyderabad, Bangalore, Dublin, Israel, Silicon Valley and other locations around the world to create workplaces that enrich the employee experience at Microsoft, support our cultural transformation and enhance productivity through seamless technology integration. We also work very closely with the local communities to align with their development plans and goals.

In the Puget Sound region, our real estate team will be busy for the next 5 to 7 years refreshing our Redmond campus. This project will include new construction, with the addition of 18 new buildings and the removal of 12. This will encompass 2.5 million square feet of new office space and once complete, we will have a total of 131 buildings.

In thinking about our vision of the global Microsoft workplace, our current Puget Sound Redmond campus poses several design challenges. Over the past 30 years, our campus has organically grown, giving it a highly fragmented user experience and aesthetic. It isn’t pedestrian or bike friendly and it lacks a “town center”, a highly successful design feature of our West Campus design. Microsoft leaders and employees want a workplace that incorporates the beauty of the Pacific Northwest into the campus environment, has multiple gathering places and a “town center” where employees and guests can mingle and recharge. This video shows the massing and footprint of the campus and not the actual architecture. We are still very early in the design process.

Our “town center” will be an open community space with a 2-acre plaza that will fit up to 12,000 people. The pedestrian and cyclist bridge over WA-520 will connect the “town centers” of our West and East Campuses to increase connections between these Microsoft communities. Our focus on multiuse outdoor spaces supported by adjacent green spaces and running and walking trails, will give people the opportunity to refresh and recharge throughout the day.

As we work through the design process, we will embody our corporate sustainability mission. Our current campus has a Zero Waste Certification and we are committed to reducing our waste further as we refine our operations. Our new construction will also feature our energy smart building technology, which uses the Microsoft Cloud for facility system monitoring to optimize energy usage.

The existing campus buildings are being refreshed and modernized. We started that project a few years ago and as of today, our team has renovated 20% of our office space. Upon completion, we will have renovated 6.7 million square feet of campus. Our most recently delivered project, Buildings 30-32 and the outdoor meeting spaces which includes three treehouses featured in that renovation, which are a hit with employees.

There will be a lot of changes to our campus over the next few years. To help our employees adapt, we have created a robust change management process that brings the personal approach together with technology, such as Minecraft and AR with HoloLens and VR experiences through Microsoft partner devices. But that is a story for another day.