Why Virgin Media O2 Designed Its New London Headquarters To Unapologetically Embrace Dei

While corporations from Lowe’s to Harley-Davidson abandon their once-vaunted efforts at improving diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in their human relations, one company has dedicated itself so heavily to these efforts that it’s physically designed DEI into its new office.

Virgin Media O2, the recently merged media and telecommunications company based in the U.K., has just opened a new headquarters in London, which has been designed specifically to accommodate diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace. Led by the architecture and design firm Gensler, the office covers the top six floors of an existing building—floors four through nine—including some ground floor customer-facing retail space. And all of its 81,750 square feet have been carefully considered to meet the needs of an uncommonly wide range of users.   

The furniture is designed to accommodate a variety of human shapes, sizes, and mobility levels. Workspaces on each floor are positioned near windows offering the wellness benefits of natural light and great views. There are private workstations, where users can block out all sounds, and meeting rooms equally comfortable for people in wheelchairs, on two feet, or streaming in via video call. Informal meeting areas were designed on each floor to enable the kind of professional and social cross-pollination valued by large companies. Dubbed “accidental meeting points” or AMPs, they’re meant for small gatherings, informal discussions, or simply taking a “tea break.” Some also offer areas where employees can go to get work done away from their own workspace.

With each floor themed according to one of VM O2’s telecommunications services—including sports broadcasts, gaming, music, and streaming—AMPs are outfitted in different colors and designs. The gaming floor, for example, has a carpet resembling pixels; the sports floor has bleacher-style seating; and the black and white furniture on the music floor was inspired by piano keys. So people seeking more vibrancy or more quietude can go to the AMP that best fits those needs.

“One of the main ways in which to create and design space for everyone is making sure that you have variety,” says Megan Dobstaff, a design director at Gensler who led the project.

Designing a DEI-centric office

To develop the DEI design, Gensler collaborated with BW: Workplace Experts, and received significant guidance from VM O2 employee focus groups, DEI representatives, and an in-house brand team. These consultations helped shape how Gensler’s designers accommodated people with different sensory sensitivities, mobility levels, and neurodiverse conditions.

Working with VM O2’s DEI employee representative group, nicknamed Ultraviolet, was especially informative. They offered the designers specific examples of team members who had been undeserved or ignored by previous office environments. Accommodating them was often easier than expected, says Dobstaff: Adding easily controlled dimmers throughout the space on all floors and temperature controls to meeting rooms, testing colors for optimized tonal contrasts in furniture coverings so the edges would be visible to partially sighted people and others for those with color blindness. “There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be driving that forward, and making space purposeful for all the different types of people who are going to be using it,” Dobstaff adds.

In terms of specific accessibility and inclusion, VM O2’s offices have gender-neutral toilets, also retreat rooms with blackout curtains for neurodivergent employees and visitors experiencing overstimulation or a panic attack. There are multi-faith rooms with Wudu facilities where adherents can wash their feet in gender-separate spaces and pray. There are sinks accessible to people of all statures, microwaves in the ninth-floor café that can be opened by right-handed people and others for left-handed people, and cabinets that can be opened by people who have no hands.

Dobstaff says the project was more focused on diversity and accessibility than any other she’d worked on but expects other projects to take DEI office design issues more seriously going forward.

“What it taught me is we should never just be making a design decision for an arbitrary reason,” she says. “There’s always some type of consideration that you could add basically to any design decision, whether that’s sensory, whether that’s visual, whether it’s accessibility, or cognitive. There’s always something.”