Plantronics: the places to work

08 Feb 2012

Plantronics has revamped its Royal Wooton Bassett office completely around the way people work more efficiently. A couple of our team went and sat on some sofas.

If there’s one thing you’d expect from a headset manufacturer then it’s the mastery of sound. This is indeed one of the things you find at Plantronics’ Royal Wootton Bassett HQ but a lot of it has been outsourced.

This is because the sound we’re talking about isn’t the sound from a headset, at which the company is indeed extremely good, but the ambient sound, which is different depending on where you’re standing.

Our tour starts in a meeting room. It seems an ordinary enough room and the air conditioning is loud enough to be heard but it’s not distracting – except it’s not air conditioning. It’s ambient noise to mask any other conversations drifting in from outside. There is a covering on the wall to absorb our own conversation – not completely, you can hear a general hubbub, but we won’t disturb anyone else and they won’t disturb us.

This is generally productive for people in the meeting space. There are similar sound damping areas in the open plan part of the office, so people can sit around a designated meeting bench, talk and not disturb their colleagues,

The whole office is designed around people’s different working needs. As might be expected from a UC specialist there are no land lines on the desks; everyone works from mobiles and soft phones. Desks are arranged so nobody directly faces anyone else, but it’s when you get away from the desks that the interesting stuff starts.

Sometimes you need to get away and work in a concentrated manner. This is where the company has built “monk cells” – small recessed working spaces in which someone is insulated from much of the outside sound, has enough space to work and according to rules and convention rather they should not be disturbed (you can cock an eyebrow but if they don’t respond it’s not personal).

There are also small informal meeting areas with sofas – these are less formal than traditional meeting rooms, everyone is visible but once again the attention to the sound dynamics in the ceiling and in the structure of the sofas means people are not audible unless they wish to be. Confidential meetings can happen in work “pods” which are properly soundproof – here there are job interviews, appraisals and other private meetings.

A mid-point between the two extremes is the curtained-off sofa area. This is curtained off by string curtains – again, no meetings are hidden, people are visible but the convention is that if the curtains are open you can interrupt, if they are closed you don’t.

It all reflects a different approach to working, and the company finds it very effective indeed. What it illustrates is that whether unified communication is in place or not, there are different tasks to perform at work – and sitting at the same desk to perform them all may not be efficient. The fact that a soft phone and UC set-up means you can move from space to space and continue to be fully contactable makes a lot of things possible – most companies have only just started by comparison.

A video interview with Plantronics on its working space will appear in the next issue of UC Bulletin

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