With the goal of achieving a productive open office, AirHelp's Berlin workplace offers a variety of creative environments for employees to rest, focus and collaborate in their day to day.

Weekday Workspace Design were engaged by AirHelp, a tech start-up, to design a scalable workspace to meet their fast-growing needs in Berlin, Germany.

AirHelp is a fast growing tech start-up that helps users get money back from airlines when a flight is delayed or cancelled. Today they have more than 700 employees with offices located across the world. In November 2018 they signed a new space in Berlin for their HQ. Today 80 employees work from their Berlin office and will grow 40% this year alone.

Our task was to create a scalable open floor plan while making room for people and life at work.

The main challenge was to create a productive open office environment. Research after research demonstrates that employees are less productive, get distracted and feel less happy at their jobs in an open plan office. 60% of workers have brought noise complaints to management making it the largest problem in today’s work space and a recent Harvard Study shows that we are 70% less collaborative in an open office. Quite simply put we seek privacy when always surrounded. The exact opposite of what the open office was intended to achieve.

Everyone is different. There are introverts, extroverts, early risers, night owls, different people thrive in different kind of environments. We believe that the success of the open plan office relays on providing different environments. The importance of this different environments is essentially about changing the dynamics of human relationships in the workplace by having a range of spaces that invite collaboration or individual work. Environments that speak to the needs of workers during a workday.

The lines between work, life, and community are blurring, and the office should reflect these new realities. Design should follow an organic path by creating environments for employee’s daily routines – the need to work alone, then together—and provide a variety of experiences throughout their day.

We implemented six crucial environments at AirHelp to solve the challenges of the open floor plan:

We set out to find a solution in the intersection between the needs of the corporate world and the needs of the modern worker. With more than 150 available seats to choose from and six different environments we build a flexible workspace where people can feel valued, independent and part of the team.

Workspace Designer: Weekday Workspace Design

Architect: FLF Architecture Design

Photography: Jacint Halasz

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