Whereas corporations from Lowe’s to Harley-Davidson abandon their once-vaunted efforts at bettering variety, fairness, and inclusion (DEI) of their human relations, one firm has devoted itself so closely to those efforts that it’s bodily designed DEI into its new workplace.
Virgin Media O2, the recently merged media and telecommunications firm based mostly within the U.Okay., has simply opened a brand new headquarters in London, which has been designed particularly to accommodate variety, fairness, and inclusion within the office. Led by the structure and design agency Gensler, the workplace covers the highest six flooring of an current constructing—flooring 4 by 9—together with some floor flooring customer-facing retail area. And all of its 81,750 sq. ft have been rigorously thought-about to fulfill the wants of an uncommonly wide selection of customers.
The furnishings is designed to accommodate a wide range of human shapes, sizes, and mobility ranges. Workspaces on every flooring are positioned close to home windows providing the wellness advantages of pure gentle and nice views. There are personal workstations, the place customers can block out all sounds, and assembly rooms equally snug for individuals in wheelchairs, on two ft, or streaming in by way of video name. Casual assembly areas have been designed on every flooring to allow the type of skilled and social cross-pollination valued by massive corporations. Dubbed “unintended assembly factors” or AMPs, they’re meant for small gatherings, casual discussions, or just taking a “tea break.” Some additionally supply areas the place staff can go to get work completed away from their very own workspace.
With every flooring themed in line with certainly one of VM O2’s telecommunications providers—together with sports activities broadcasts, gaming, music, and streaming—AMPs are outfitted in numerous colours and designs. The gaming flooring, for instance, has a carpet resembling pixels; the sports activities flooring has bleacher-style seating; and the black and white furnishings on the music flooring was impressed by piano keys. So individuals searching for extra vibrancy or extra quietude can go to the AMP that most closely fits these wants.
“One of many most important methods wherein to create and design area for everybody is ensuring that you’ve got selection,” says Megan Dobstaff, a design director at Gensler who led the challenge.
Designing a DEI-centric workplace
To develop the DEI design, Gensler collaborated with BW: Workplace Experts, and obtained important steerage from VM O2 worker focus teams, DEI representatives, and an in-house model crew. These consultations helped form how Gensler’s designers accommodated individuals with totally different sensory sensitivities, mobility ranges, and neurodiverse situations.
Working with VM O2’s DEI worker consultant group, nicknamed Ultraviolet, was particularly informative. They provided the designers particular examples of crew members who had been undeserved or ignored by earlier workplace environments. Accommodating them was typically simpler than anticipated, says Dobstaff: Including simply managed dimmers all through the area on all flooring and temperature controls to assembly rooms, testing colours for optimized tonal contrasts in furnishings coverings so the sides could be seen to partially sighted individuals and others for these with colour blindness. “There’s no cause why we shouldn’t be driving that ahead, and making area purposeful for all of the various kinds of people who find themselves going to be utilizing it,” Dobstaff provides.
By way of particular accessibility and inclusion, VM O2’s places of work have gender-neutral bathrooms, additionally retreat rooms with blackout curtains for neurodivergent staff and guests experiencing overstimulation or a panic assault. There are multi-faith rooms with Wudu facilities the place adherents can wash their ft in gender-separate areas and pray. There are sinks accessible to individuals of all statures, microwaves within the ninth-floor café that may be opened by right-handed individuals and others for left-handed individuals, and cupboards that may be opened by individuals who haven’t any palms.

Dobstaff says the challenge was extra centered on variety and accessibility than some other she’d labored on however expects different initiatives to take DEI workplace design points extra significantly going ahead.
“What it taught me is we should always by no means simply be making a design choice for an arbitrary cause,” she says. “There’s at all times some sort of consideration that you could possibly add principally to any design choice, whether or not that’s sensory, whether or not that’s visible, whether or not it’s accessibility, or cognitive. There’s at all times one thing.”