One Flipkart: Better. Together

Flipkart recently moved into a large, consolidated campus located at one of Bangalore buzziest places Embassy Tech Village. Aimed at better collaboration, synergy and improving operational efficiency, Flipkart decided to consolidate its multiple offices across Bangalore to one location in 2015.

All Flipkart moved into the new office recently and the leadership team from Flipkart including, Kalyan Krishnamurthy, Binny Bansal and Sachin Bansal were present with their employees for the launch of the new campus.

Here are a few features of the new campus that would be interesting to note –

• Amenities: The Food-court, Gym, Daycare, etc. are provided by Embassy as common amenities on the campus. Flipkart intends to use these shared facilities, thereby using the space available in A, B and C largely for its business requirements. The general idea is to also allow the employees to experience and enjoy the benefits and options that a large campus offers.

• Driving Collaboration: Consolidating all our Bangalore offices and moving into a central location has its own benefits. By co-locating all our business units into one new, agile work environment, we aim to create a unified office that supports cooperation, collaboration and flexibility. We believe centralization will promote increased productivity and engagement through efficient ways of working.

• Design Approach for the buildings: From a master planning perspective, Flipkart suggested to the developer to design the Non SEZ portion of the ETV as a mini-city on the lines of typical European town concept. This now manifests itself into 3 unique looking buildings with variable volumes and variety of façade treatment. The central street forming the “High Street” impression with food courts on the both sides and piazzas at the either ends.

Office Interiors:

• Layouts: From a planning perspective, the requirements of the new office were drawn up based on the workplace usage study in our previous offices. Additionally, the leadership’s vision of the new office called for the spaces to be efficient, functional & comfortable, and contemporary, open, bright and lively

• Concept Design: The directions emerged from the workplace strategy document for the variety of spaces for activity based workspace. There are improved meeting room ratios, usage of connecting bridges between the buildings to locate the internal staircases to induce people to walk across floors and benefit from chance encounters & collaboration, and employees’ amenities like recreation and entertainment spaces, relax rooms, mothers room, laundromat, café shop, outdoor recreational / activity space.

• Look and Feel/ Material Selection: Spaces in general, are therefore functional in their planning and treatment, with ‘frugality’ being a key attribute of the design. The idea was to have simple and smart spaces, void of unnecessary ornamentation. With the buildings being composite structures, steel sections and members were exposed and the interiors were designed in line with the structure rather than attempt to conceal it. This also brought in the much-needed connect with the warehousing and logistics part of the business. With this approach, the underlying idea therefore, became to use a handful of rugged materials sensibly – mainly, steel, concrete, glass, timber. The result therefore, is a space that is probably a true reflection of Flipkart and its business. Usage of five Flipkart brand colours across the floors has added the playfulness and reflects the young population in the facility.

• Communication Concept: Interviews with the leadership and key stakeholders about the values and messaging required in general, pointed at ‘Energy’ and ‘Collaboration’ as keywords. That, combined with the ability to look at things from a different angle resulted in the concept of ‘Meet Me on The Flip Side’. The wall graphics and meeting room names for the three buildings were arrived at with this as the underlying theme, using sub-themes across the floors and buildings.

Additional Notable Features –

• Interconnecting bridges between buildings and stairs within floorplates
• Meeting room clusters located centrally to maximize natural light to the workstations
• Windows provided with blinds only in locations prone to glare
• Large pantries and informal meeting areas to allow for collaboration
• Drinking water made available at all pantries from a R.O plant – employees fill their own bottles
• Waste Management:
  1. No individual dustbins
  2. Waste segregation at source
  3. Minimal plastic – dishwashers planned for reusable crockery and cutlery, steel water bottles for all employees
• Quiet Zones: enclosed spaces in each building to allow for quiet and focused working
• Indoor Recreation Rooms – with VR games, simulators and a Golf Simulator
• An Outdoor Recreation space on the terrace – multi-game playing surface for futsal, basketball and cricket. Human foosball, mini-golf, Climbing Wall and Bocce Ball for recreation
• Large amounts of internal landscape on all floors – including a landscaped terrace with seating on Level 1
• Going Green inside Flipkart- Desk plants for everyone at the new campus
• Laundromat counter to cater to employee laundry requirements
• USB charging points at all workstations and meeting rooms