17 hours ago
Ford has a vision for the office of the future, and it starts with this 100-year-old building
Even though it was built more than 100 years ago, a former engineering lab on the Ford Motor campus in Dearborn, Michigan, is a vision of the company's future.
The building originally opened in 1924 as a kind of early research and development lab, but Ford has now transformed it into a modern office building that the company sees as a model for its new global workplace standards. With more than 300 million square feet of offices in 46 countries, the approach for this one building will have wide implications for the face of the company, and the workforce it's able to attract.
The Ford Engineering Lab, as it is still known, is Ford's version of a post-pandemic, human-centric workplace, according to Jennifer Kolstad, Ford's global design and brand director.
Sitting on a long curving couch within one of the open collaboration and social spaces in the center of the building, she points out the range of spaces around her. There are small modular meeting rooms, clusters of desks for small teams, café seats, and cushy chairs with side tables that look straight out of a fancy hotel lobby. 'Before, Ford Motor Co. was a culture of desks,' Kolstad says. 'We have consciously worked to reconstruct the association with how work gets done, which is that work does not necessarily occur at a desk.'
