Business Don't miss out on the headlines from Business. Followed categories will be added to My News. It was 2015 and Booking.
com had a problem. The market capitalisation of its parent company had grown more than five times since a Wall Street debut near the turn of the century. But at home in the Netherlands, employees of the travel booking website – founded in an Amsterdam attic in 2006 – were frustrated.
They were spread across 12 office locations sprawled around the capital. Meeting in person meant travelling from one to another. Often, they couldn’t tell where colleagues were located.
They complained about time wasted finding each other. Executives saw the limitations on future growth. But there was no available office space in the city big enough to fit its purposes.
The travel company was hemmed in by its own location. In a post-pandemic world, where workers may sit in not 12 but 12,000 locations, what is the role of the office? For Atlassian, it’s a symbolic building with attendance optional. Amazon has made presence mandatory five days a week.
But either way, say architects and human resource managers, the psychological needs imposed on the building are greater than ever. Ideally, it should incite workers to visit when they don’t have to – and fortify wellbeing when they do. Its physical structures should better than ever support opportunities for intellectual and social exchanges.
At its peak the office campus can forge a strong psychological anchor for .