The Stanford Health Care Planning, Design and Construction (PDC) team needed to improve its workplace effectiveness and prepare for growth. Project sites distributed across the Bay Area, required long, tiring commutes to and from their Menlo Park, CA office and among project locations. Staff often didn't return home after work in order to avoid the commute. Additionally, the staff perceived that their existing office is at or near capacity, posing challenges to potential growth.
To quantify the team’s concerns and develop a case for action, MKThink utilized residential geographic data, traffic patterns, calendar schedule, access systems, and space inventories.
Observation and engagement with the PDC team provided qualitative support to the analytics.
The team ultimately developed a distributed work model strategy that mitigated the primary concerns in the most cost effective manner. Key components of the solution included:
Keep the headquarters location as a cultural hub
Open a secondary location closer to the primary residential location of most staff
Implement policies and technology supporting remote work and team communication
The solution broke the old-fashioned model of “everyone under one roof” management and leveraged emerging technologies as a means to maintain communications and reinforce cultural connectivity.