"What would the office in the next 10 years be?" was the question KPMG Thailand, one of the largest professional audit, tax, and advisory services firms in Thailand, asked when they were looking to renovate their 12,000-square meter office space. Our answer to the question is that the future workspace will need to embrace the functional and aesthetic elements of design while encompassing the new possible ways people work and interact.
KPMG is the first and only large-scale firm in Thailand to have an office that achieves such a high level of agility. No employee has a fixed seat, and everyone can change where they want to sit wherever they want. With such freedom and flexibility, the design team comes up with three different themes: Living, Industrial, and Lively, for the workstations, allowing the employees to choose their workspaces based on their preferences. During the day, they carry laptops, use softphones, and keep their personal belongings in lockers. They change the place they want to work in based on their activities, meeting colleagues, gathering new ideas, and feel energized throughout the day. Additionally, with the digitally-driven workspace, when COVID-19 happened, they continue to work seamlessly using all the digital tools, taking massive advantage of their operations and work culture's agility and mobility.
With most of the staff going out to meet clients daily, once KPMG chose us to redesign its workspace, we proposed the idea of an open-plan office where everyone can move around and not having a fixed seat. We ended up reducing the company's 1900+ staff seats to approximately 800 activity-based working desks and 400 co-lab chairs. In the meantime, we provide more meeting rooms and huddle rooms while creating many junctions for their collaborative group works, including a reasonably large space called "SKY BAR" for employees to have lunch or after-work party, encouraging physical interactions to balance the online communication in the digital world. Ultimately, we can reduce the company's use of rental office space from 12,000 square meters to 9,000 square meters.
By providing a very flexible workspace, the question concerning the importance of physical space arises. The answer is simple. It's because we are still human. We need social and physical interactions with real people. We are comforted by a good, trusting relationship, and we all want to be recognized. The KPMG Digital workplace offers all of those things, impressively so.
