With over 70 world-class offices spread across the globe, Adobe is internationally ranked at #26 among the best workplaces by Fortune magazine. It is, therefore, a prodigious task to create and maintain facilities for a company with operations as widespread as Adobe. To understand the process behind its methodically ideated measures and strategies, Commercial Design spoke to Chris Ross, senior director and head of global site operations, based out of Adobe’s headquarter office in San Jose, USA.
The Adobe office building at Sector 132, Gurgaon, designed by Sanjay Wadhwa of SWBI Architects.
Contributing to the growth of the company and its employees
With an undergraduate degree in organisational behaviour and industrial relations and a master’s in business, Ross began her career at a property management company. This gave her an early understanding of how a workspace can add more value for its inhabitants and help increase their productivity. Her experience in diverse industries — from IT to banking and finance – helped her gain clear focus on two critical parameters. These are: how can a workplace benefit and co-exist in tandem with the environment; and how it can empower and support its stakeholders.
View into the courtyard of the Adobe office located at Sector 132.
Over the years, Adobe has continued to strengthen its position as one of the best workspaces in the world. This underlines the unceasing efforts of the company’s in-house workplace team, which strives to constantly improvise its operations and objectives to create some of the most exceptional offices.
Managing large facilities, however, is no easy feat. To tackle this challenge, one of the foremost strategy adopted by Ross and her team was repetition. “In our world, repetition is how we scale up. We were able to do more, if we did it the same way everywhere. With the realisation that the basic operations and functions remain the same, we continue to adjust to support specific business requirement but in a consistent and standardised method,” Ross reveals.
“Our team is responsible for everything that happens within the four walls of the company’s building. With an aim to build an environment that is attune with our core values — genuine, exceptional, innovative and involved — we consider these as the driving factors in the design and operation of the workplace. While we try to make it as scalable, collaborative and transparent, as possible, we continuously work towards integrating the sense of belonging for our employees. That makes the biggest difference. Especially for a creative company like Adobe, it’s imperative to provide flexibility and resilience to support a diverse working culture. Therefore, we have several breakout areas, collaborative zones, open cafes, etc, that can inspire ideas and stimulate conversations even over a cup of coffee. Despite being a global brand, we also ensure the offices are in sync with local culture and flair. We call this ‘glocalisation’. Though the building displays brandings and graphics of the company’s many products, its context is a unique symbiosis of the city and its varying fundamental elements,” explains Ross.
Observations on the Indian FM industry
Through her experience and engagement with the Indian FM industry, Ross shares, “There are few aspects that are unique to India within the domain of this profession, such as transport and food services.” Though these services are provided in other countries too, she states that the scale is not as large as it is here. In order to deliver efficient services at such an extensive scale, the company has dexterously adapted technology to its advantage.
Resolving challenges: identify, ideate and initiate
It’s a known fact that FM in India is still at a nascent stage. Traversing through the five years of her experience with Adobe India, Ross points out some of the critical challenges faced by her and the team; and the strategies adopted to streamline their functions. “One of the first things I did after onboarding at Adobe was to focus on detailing out clarity regarding roles and responsibilities between the outsourced FM company and our team. Thus, our first line of order, was to identify and allocate roles for each party involved, so that the teams worked in partnership without gaps and redundancies. The Adobe team undertook business relationship management, overseeing the strategy around how we operate the buildings and manage the finances; while our outsourced partners are responsible for the day-to-day operations.”
Once that was decided, we then focused on defining the outcomes we wanted to achieve and the strategies to get there. Initially in India, we did not have outsourced partners; most of the work was done through number of different vendors or the landlord. As a solution to this, we deliberated on two options — adopting a regional strategy, where we have a regional partner across our portfolio, or we take it up at a global level. We eventually opted for a global model and have been practicing that since 2014.”
The team then went on to identify the gaps in the organisation that hindered with our ability to meet our vision. We, therefore, focussed on understanding the intricacies of the business across different verticals — marketing, product development, and accounting, among others. This helped them hone the model and provide better support to the specific requirements and demands of each segment.
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