(upbeat music)
- [Adam Falk] At LinkedIn's flagship office space,
there are more than 75 different types of seating.
- This feels like a spot for maybe a really quick call
or just answering a couple of emails.
Work or NBA Jam.
Yeah. This is your space. And this is mine.
- Yeah. This is my space, and that's your space.
- [Adam Falk] Many of these seats
were actually meant to be desks.
- So I think during our initial plans,
we had just standard desks in this space
with traditional conference rooms and huddle rooms.
- [Adam Falk] But the pandemic changed that.
- How much of what we're seeing in this space
is new as a result of the pandemic?
- 100% of it.
- [Adam Falk] This recently opened space
is designed for hybrid work,
a model that has emerged as the leading choice
for LinkedIn and others,
with 42% of people with remote capable jobs
working partly at home,
according to a February Gallup poll.
So what does a hybrid office look like?
I toured Building One with the project's leaders to find out
and to get a glimpse into what could be the future
of workplace design.
(upbeat music)
Building One is the new hub of LinkedIn's campus
in Silicon valley.
It has six floors, roughly 239,000 square feet,
and room for about 1,500 employees
- Prior to the pandemic, when we looked at this building,
really at that point the main goal
was fitting as many people as we could in this space.
- [Adam Falk] The original floor plans
called for 1,080 individual workstations.
The thinking was, "One employee, one desk."
- Once we were sent home during the pandemic,
a lot of that changed.
And much of what we were trying to solve for
before the pandemic was not the same thing
that we were looking at at that moment.
(upbeat music)
- [Adam Falk] So with the help
of its design partners at NBBJ,
LinkedIn retooled the space,
cutting the number of desks in half to 569 workstations
and adding dozens of new, nontraditional seating setups.
- What did you and LinkedIn learn from the pandemic
that would result in the space that we're in right now?
- I think we really wanted to do a lot of experimentation,
because we just didn't know.
No one had a crystal ball
about what the future would actually be.
So we wanted to provide
as many variety of spaces as possible.
(upbeat music)
(door opens)
- [Adam Falk] The variety starts
right when employees walk in.
The design does away with a large lobby in favor of a cafe.
- Daniel and Adam.
- This is one of my favorite spaces of the buildings.
The idea of this space is that the minute you walk in,
you feel the buzz, there's people getting coffee,
there's people moving throughout the space.
- [Adam Falk] The cafe spills into the first of two areas
LinkedIn calls its co-working spaces.
Think open, non-reserved seating.
The co-working area on the second floor
was added in the redesign.
- So we've got primary work points here.
- [Adam Falk] Desks with monitors
and tall backed booths with Ottomans dot the space that,
looking back at the original design,
was once full of assigned workstations.
- So a space like this is great for those smaller
time periods where you might come in and work with your team
and then go home and do some focus time.
Or for vice versa.
- And that's okay with LinkedIn,
to come in for half the day
and work at home for half the day?
- Yeah
LinkedIn's approach is that we are leading with trust.
(upbeat music)
The idea is that we trust our employees to make
the decision that's gonna be best for them and their team.
- [Adam Falk] Co-working is open to anyone in the company
for any amount of time.
Employees assigned to the building
who plan to work there all day will likely move upstairs.
- The concept behind how the floors are planned is
the entry to the building is the most social.
And the farther that you get into the space,
it becomes more focused
- [Adam Falk] Workers sit in so-called neighborhoods
or areas assigned to their teams.
- We call this the living room.
- [Adam Falk] Neighborhoods are split,
about half alternative workspaces
and half traditional desks.
Those desks are mostly here in the back.
- Was this sort of what the whole floor
was meant to look like before the pandemic.
- It is what the whole floor looked like
before the pandemic.
- What led the decision to get rid of desk space?
- Because we imagined that not everyone
is going to come to work eight hours a day.
- [Adam Falk] So rather than fill the space
with potentially empty desks,
of which I still saw plenty, new furniture was added
based on something called the postures matrix.
- The postures matrix is about the amount of time
that we imagine a person would be working
doing a certain activity,
combined with the amount of ergonomics to support that.
- So how long am I meant to spend at this chair here?
- So as a high table we imagine that you spend less time
compared to a low, standard table.
So this would be used maybe 30 to 60 minutes.
- [Adam Falk] LinkedIn employees in Building One
don't have assigned desks.
Instead they can grab a seat anywhere in their neighborhood.
But it's not quite hot-desking either,
as seats don't need to be reserved.
- Even before the pandemic,
our desk utilization I think was around 30 to 40%
- 30 to 40%?
- Meaning that even though people might be
in the office all day, they're at meetings,
they're at lunch, they might be sick,
or just not in the office.
And so now we're really looking at
what does that desk utilization look like in a hybrid world?
- Do you know what that is yet?
- No.
(laughter)
- [Adam Falk] But in a hybrid office,
(upbeat music)
the individual setup is arguably easier to design for it.
It's the conference room that's tricky.
Here, LinkedIn is, again, experimenting,
from conference rooms that look like living rooms-
- What we wanted to do was to take away the formality
of meetings from offsite to onsite,
and put people in a neutral position
where if you are at home as a part of the conversation,
you're feeling very comfortable
interacting with your colleagues.
- [Adam Falk] To conference rooms packed with tech,
including cameras positioned at table height
that reframe to better show the speaker.
- So it makes it a little bit more
like you're sitting at the table.
- [Adam Falk] And cameras
that help make the physical digital.
- When folks are actually writing on this white board,
typically what you would be doing is writing like this
and a camera would be behind you shadowing other people
from seeing what it is that you you're actually doing.
- Right, they wouldn't be able to see
actually what's going on.
- This technology ghosts you out
so that people that are remote can see what you're writing.
- Can we test it?
- Let's do it. - All right.
(dry erase marker squeaking)
- [Adam Falk] I'm standing in front of it now.
- [Robert Norwood] See what it's capturing?
- [Adam Falk] Yeah. I see what you mean.
- So you have this new space with all of these
new bits of technology and different types of seating.
Is it meant to encourage people
to come back into the office?
- I think it's meant to welcome people
if that's where they need to be.
But if that person is gonna do their best work
and have their best contributions to their team
while being remote, that's okay.
(upbeat music)
- [Adam Falk] That flexibility may not be possible
for some companies.
And others like Tesla simply aren't interested.
But LinkedIn sees Building One as a kind of test.
One that others could learn from.
- To what extent is what we're seeing here
in LinkedIn's office the future of work?
- What we have is an awesome opportunity to experiment
and to see what happens over time.
And this is entirely flexible space.
It might turn out that
what we need are more desks in the future
and that this could be changed into that.
Or it might turn into a completely different model.
But the experimentation and the observation
is really the key to seeing what the future is.
(upbeat music continues)