Company ditches cubicles for a wall-free culture
Irdeto, a content management and security company, eschewed individual desks—and desktop debris—for an open environment where people actually (egad!) talk to one another.
What the employees have come to discover over the past few months, says senior marketing communications manager Lisa Spencer, is that they never needed it. What they did need, however, was a more open setting to share information.
“Our global culture is so small, and it’s about the immediate exchange of ideas,” says Spencer. “That’s—kind of on a micro level—what we’re doing here. We’re mimicking what’s going on in the world.”
As Senior Vice President Martin Sendyk put it to the Ottawa Citizen: “If you’re a coal miner, you work in a coal mine. If you’re a pilot, you work in a plane. If you’re a knowledge worker, you share knowledge.”
Eliminating desks
Irdeto’s office is just one out of 20 the company has worldwide. A few years ago, senior leaders in the company’s West headquarters in Hoofddorp, Netherlands, and its East headquarters in Beijing started thinking of ways to make internal communication just as innovative as what the company does externally.
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