Redmond, Washington, after working from home for more than two years, Microsoft employees returning to the company’s headquarters from next week may not recognize this place.
Since they disappeared, the whole building has taken shape in the center of the campus. The company is now working on a reconstruction project to re plan a large area of land where Bill Gates & Co. built Microsoft into a technology giant 40 years ago.
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In Seattle and across the United States, technology is gobbling up office space, although telecommuting and hybrid work dominate
The company’s original Redmond building was demolished in 2019, so the existence of large-scale construction sites is nothing new, but the progress since then will let employees really see their future workplace for the first time.
At the same time, there is a lot of workspace. The project was carried out on 72 of the company’s 500 acres, and the company had moved workers to nearby offices before the outbreak.
Microsoft told geekwire this week that the first building in the reconstruction project is expected to move in by the end of 2023. Prior to the outbreak of the epidemic, the first buildings of the project are expected to open in 2022 and 2023.
The company announced last week that it would fully reopen its facilities in Washington state, including its Redmond headquarters, from February 28.
Chris caposela, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer, wrote in a post announcing the news that from that date, employees will have 30 days to “adjust their daily work and adopt work preferences agreed with their managers”.
The company said that with the update of the policy, its expectation is that “employees will spend at least 50% of their time in the office and work with their leaders according to the appropriate schedule.”
Microsoft said it was “constantly listening to understand what our employees need to improve their work efficiency” and planned to use data from employee surveys and building management systems (such as badge access points and conference room reservations) to understand and respond to new models of how employees work.
“My team has been designing and building spaces that support mixed work for many years,” Michael Ford, the company’s corporate vice president for global workplace services, wrote in a LinkedIn post last fall.
He added that the criterion for the 2019 coronavirus epidemic is that we have adapted to our health and health standards, and our goal remains the same: adopt a research-driven approach to design our workplace, rooted in all aspects of our inclusive basic design strategy.
Located on the east side of national highway 520, the reconstruction project will eventually include 17 new four – and five story buildings with a total area of about 3 million square feet. The new campus replaces the original “X-Wing” structure and nearby buildings with a total area of about 1 million square feet.
The southeast part of the project will include large amusement parks and open spaces. A bicycle and pedestrian bridge on interstate 520 will connect the northwest corner of the project to the future sound transit link light rail station, which is now scheduled to open in 2023, as well as the west campus where the company’s entertainment and equipment team is located.
Microsoft hired four different architects and general contractors for this work – designers LMN, NBBJ, WRNS studio and zgf architects and contractors Skanska, Balfour Beatty, Gly and sellen – and divided the project into four parts, which are called “Villages” in the planning document