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educate our team members so they can sell it to our customers and provide solutions for them in turn.” New Digs In order to be seen to be walking the walk, Zoom opened a 15,000 square-foot office space in Holburn, London this summer, making the case for the ideal workspace that is split between different areas of hot desks, glass meeting rooms, and private boardrooms, amongst other areas. Of course, the same Zoom interface is running throughout, to the point where gaining access to reception without a pass is a Zoom call away. This UX also has oversight of where people are planning to work at every point in the day, can also suggest the best places to sit that day, and is designed to be the first interaction point before coming into the office. “Employees want their path to the office to be easy,” said Collins. “That’s why we’re allowing our employees to start their journey on an app. Before they even leave the house, they can get their parking set, order lunch, book a certain conference room for the right size of the meeting, book an open collaboration space if you know your team is going to come together, and raise tickets to add something like a rolling whiteboard in the space. “The dashboard is key to evolving this new strategy. Now businesses can understand what in the space is being used, what is not being used, and what the most favoured technology is, and lean into that. The analytics has changed my career immensely, I’m able to learn every single day how people are using
our office spaces. “We now know engineers work very differently than salespeople or marketing folks, this [office in London] is predominantly a sales office, but if it was an engineering centre I think we would curate the space a little bit differently, have more booths, make it quieter with some acoustic panelling in the ceiling, and some different lighting because they’re staring at their screen, coding and generally work very differently than the [sales] team that is here.” Leading by example As for Zoom, Collins said that they will continue to innovate, as well as help businesses make the best use of the property they inhabit. “I think our position in the market is more about educating,” said Collins. “We’re not saying businesses should kit out their offices in a certain way. Instead, we’re giving them a kind of path to design their workplace for an evolving culture. “I think it’s okay to say that we’re experimenting, we’ve done a few successful pilots and some that have not been a success, but we’ve learned a lot from each of them. That’s how we continue to be innovators and thought leaders. “Real estate and the workplace has a bigger part in culture now than it ever did. We’re not going back to a sea of desks with assigned seating anymore, we want people to have the flexibility and the freedom to move about the space and use it in different ways. It’s not just coming to the office to sit at your desk and be on Zoom all day.”
Before they even leave the house, they can get their parking set, order lunch, book a certain conference room for the right size of the meeting, book an open collaboration space if you know your team is going to come together
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