Genesys’ Durham office lease was expiring. The real estate team needed help understanding the breadth of local employee needs as part of the future site design process

Challenges:

• The team faced a compressed timeline due to lease expiration dates

• Real estate and HR had never before involved design thinking in their office decision-making processes

• Most employees had never been asked to be part of the design decisions around the office experience

We began by conducting research through employee surveys and user interviews. Our research spanned over 400 minutes of zoom calls, 200 employees surveyed, 14 interviews, across 5 business units. Overall, research findings showed that the current office design created barriers to collaboration, a reduced sense of belonging and ineffective private spaces

Based on that research, we defined three primary personas, and areas of focus: The Team Manager, Individual Contributor and Sales Manager. Each of those personas had different prioritized needs for their office experience. Our goal was to understand their needs better, and find alignment across them all

We traveled to the site, conducted ethnographic research and ran workshops with employees, crafting the office journeys of each persona. Participants then prioritized their key pain points and opportunities

Finally, the core team took the prioritized workshop outputs, and generated design principles for the new site. These principles—informed by the employees themselves—were leveraged by the real estate team and architecture firm in the design decisions for thew new Raleigh-Durham office site