At a time when so many people are working from home, how can we make working from the office more desirable? This was the challenge that Natixis in Portugal presented us with.
As a Centre of Expertise whose mission is to transform traditional banking by developing innovative solutions for Groupe BPCE business, operations, and work culture worldwide, they needed our help. As a result of a long-standing business relationship with Tétris and our parent company JLL, Natixis entrusted us to transform their newest office floors in Porto into a workplace their employees would want to leave the comforts of working from home for.
With the rise in new ways of working, we needed to find a way to balance the needs of Natixis’ employees with those of the business. In bringing them back to the workplace, we needed to make sure they would feel fully integrated and able to collaborate in-person as teams continued to grow.
Can the whole world fit into a single building?
With over 30 different nationalities represented by its employees just in Portugal, Natixis was already global by nature. It became clear that this diversity could serve as inspiration for the final solution.
Different people, with diverse cultural backgrounds, driven by one purpose: making an impact.
We embraced the challenge and set up a diverse team of multi-located designers and fit-out experts, who could provide a wide range of experience and skills to enrich the project. We created a unique concept for Natixis that pays tribute to its unified global culture. Disruptive and pioneering, it represents the true office of the future, enhancing collaboration, creativity, innovation, and efficiency through an immersive work experience.
Within this new workspace, we created twelve villages, each one representing an iconic city spanning all four corners of the globe. Each village has its own local identity, combining different sounds, smells and architectural elements that characterise each location.
In Porto Village, employees are welcomed by the aroma of Port wine and are encouraged to work as a team in a space that resembles a traditional wine cellar.
In Muscat, you can sit on a soft dune while enjoying a local tea.
In Manaus, you can feel the density of the forest while listening to the sounds of animals.
The workstations, meeting rooms and coworking zones in each village allow staff to find their preferred environment and do their best work. As well as a place to work, each village includes a place to eat and a place to mingle. Our goal was to create engaging environments that nurture collaboration according to individual teams’ needs.
We embraced sustainable practices through the use of second-hand furniture from not-for-profit organisations in Lisbon and Porto, we sourced materials from local businesses, used carbon neutral flooring and added biophilia and LED lighting throughout the building.
To create a technologically enabled space, we provided IT infrastructure and tools to enable each village to seamlessly connect not only with each other, but with their Groupe BPCE colleagues around the world. We also used technology to provide the unique immersive experience, from emitting smells characteristic of the villages locations to showing a live transmission of the sky or a Paris landscape in Paris Village.
We designed an innovative space that stimulates collaboration and knowledge sharing, promotes the company’s core values of Diversity and Inclusion and gives people a reason to come back to the office.
Where in the world would you like to work today?
