As part of the Revolution @ Work programme, a forum to share experiences and promote innovation around working methods and workspaces, Unibail-Rodamco’s lab for Open Innovation, UR Lab, took part in a think tank session around the Office of Tomorrow, on December 8th and 9th in La Défense. Here is an overview of the group’s initiatives to rethink the workplace of tomorrow.
Our working methods are profoundly changing. Societal changes and digital transformation have disrupted our ways of collaborating, thinking and contemplating work. It is crucial to adapt our collaborative spaces to the change to facilitate flexibility, transversality, sharing and more openness to the outside.
Unibail-Rodamco has fully understood the trend and set about building the office of tomorrow for leaner, more creative and more innovative companies.
Architecture 2.0
The architectural initiatives of Unibail-Rodamco have taken a new dimension since the 2000’s. The constructions of the group comply with environmental criteria and modularity principles. The Triangle Tower project, in the Parc des Expositions of the Porte de Versailles in Paris, planned for 2021, is a bold architectural avant-garde, both in terms of technics and of aesthetics.
Equally, the Sisters Towers, planned for 2021 in La Défense, are a model of modernity: both buildings have bevelled facades, green spaces in loggias every other floor, and are connected by a bridge with a hanging garden, 100m above ground. The latest technology standards will be applied both during the construction phase (materials) and in terms of services offered (smartapps). In this way, the Sisters Towers, composed of a hotel and offices, will offer a new art of working for office workers, and a new art of living for tourists and executives visiting La Défense.
A “New Art of Working”
After studying the user journey, Unibail-Rodamco placed wellbeing at work at the heart of its considerations when rethinking workplaces. The group theorised the “New Art of Working”, minimising stress points to foster productivity and build workspaces users love.
The new offices are adaptable to all possible working methods: closed offices, open spaces, flexible offices, coworking spaces, etc, to address the new trends of today’s corporate world: agility, openness, mobility and wellbeing.
Thus, in terms of interior design, Unibail-Rodamco gives priority to natural lighting for all its commercial properties. The great glass walls of the Majunga Tower flood the working environment with maximised natural lighting.
In parallel, aspects of everyday’s life are introduced within offices. The Majunga Tower counts 5 dining areas as well as a convenience store to help out users all day long. The entrance hall was built as a multipurpose space, open to coworkers and guests. The Sisters Towers will offer innovative company restaurants: canteen, kiosque, self service or branded restaurants.
The approach of Unibail-Rodamco is multisensorial and aims at making these workspaces user-friendly. Therefore, the working areas are open to the outside, with multiple outdoor green spaces and wellbeing and sportive activities such as sport
Smart-offices, green-offices
Unibail-Rodamco’s buildings are at the cutting-edge of technology. Collaborative spaces are highly connected and each tower has a dedicated smartphone application (the service is offered in the Trinity, Majunga and Sisters towers for example). As soon as guests arrive at Majunga, guests can declare themselves at reception terminals.
Ecology is also part of the innovations. Unibail offices aim at environmental excellence, from their construction phase to their operational phase. Those projects follow the CSR guidelines of the group, “Better Places 2030”, which were announced in September 2016 and aim at significantly reducing the carbon footprint linked to the construction and exploitation. Thus, the Triangle Tower will be 4 times more energy efficient than the average for buildings of that size.
Workspaces and open innovation: Unibail-Rodamco’s Mixer
Companies sometimes need the support of external resources. Unibail-Rodamco therefore decided to reinvent its own headquarters by inaugurating the Mixer last September, a 900-sq m collaborative space dedicated to innovation, where startups, partners and coworkers work along to reinvent tomorrow’s shopping centres and offices. Every week, the Mixer hosts meetings and conferences on architecture, digital revolution and sustainable development.
The Mixer was built as a transitional space for the outside to feed the inside, where startups contribute to an open innovation strategy. The hub is conceived as a welcoming space with green areas and different atmospheres, stimulating confrontations between startupers and Unibail-Rodamco coworkers.
All those initiatives make Unibail-Rodamco an active agent of the revolution of workspaces and of urban thinking, at the crossroads of considerations such as mobility, modularity, flexibility, wellbeing and ecology. By accompanying the change, the group lays the foundation of the workplace of tomorrow, and, more broadly-speaking, of the city of tomorrow.