Life insurer designs flexible, employee-centric headquarters with OpenBlue

A new era of hybrid work presents a strategic opportunity

As a U.S. life insurance provider made plans to launch a hybrid work model at its 765,000-square-foot headquarters, senior leadership had three priorities:

• Protect the brand’s employee-centric culture
• Strengthen its commitment to sustainability
• Meet employees’ needs and preferences so they can do their best work

The organization was already using OpenBlue Workplace for space planning and facilities management. With the transition to hybrid work, leadership wanted to enhance the in-office experience by adding room and desk booking options. They also wanted a solution that could help them better understand how their hybrid workplace was performing to inform future real estate and workplace adjustments.

Designing flexible workspaces with space and utilization data

During this transformation, the insurance provider embarked on a discovery process, meeting with internal leaders and employees to understand their work habits and needs. Using data from Workplace, they worked with an architecture firm to design new spaces, workstations and amenities, including:

• Community spaces for collaboration
• Huddle rooms with different types of seating arrangements
• Reservable workstations
• Quiet rooms for focused work
• Flex spaces for agile teams
• Mothers’ rooms
• Lockers

The corporate services team used OpenBlue Workplace to update floorplans, record new space types, store employee work arrangements, import security badge data and manage lockers. Then, they added on capabilities by integrating OpenBlue Employee and OpenBlue Insights and installing occupancy sensors.

With Employee, the insurer’s employees could use their phones to easily find and book rooms, equipment, lockers or shared desks based on their preferred workspace type or location within the workplace. Sensors installed on workstations, meeting room tables and soft seating tracked utilization so the team could compare actual usage against reservation data in Employee. And with OpenBlue Insights, an advanced workplace analytics solution, facilities teams could automate data gathering, providing powerful insights on space analytics, room and desk use and reservation trends.

A modern campus that continues to evolve

With newly designed workspaces, the insurer launched the new hybrid work structure successfully across the organization. Employees use the digital tools to reserve spaces and navigate the campus, easing the transition to the new working structure.

To continuously improve the workspaces, the facilities teams use department surveys and feedback as well as sensor data to answer questions like:

• How are the different spaces being used?
• Which types of workstations are most and least popular?
• When are the peak utilization days and times?

The insights have also helped the organization improve its sustainability efforts. With better utilization data, facilities teams can adjust energy usage throughout the campus to prevent waste.