Mercadona Offices in Oporto
We break with the system of isolated and independent departments and implement an open, agile and flexible office concept.
Client
Mercadona, a leading company in the national food distribution sector. It currently has more than 1,500 stores, supplied by 9 of its own logistics centers. It has a workforce of 75,000 workers, who develop their professional careers in the company.
Challenge
The project for the adaptation of Mercadona’s new offices in Oporto (Portugal) arose as an opportunity to design a new operations space that would transform the existing office model and update it to the new trends and technological requirements.
STRATEGY
With the support of the international consulting firm BICG, the project has been based on the application of the “activity-based work” model, which aims to break with the system of isolated and independent departments and implement an open, agile and flexible office concept.
It is a strategy based on mobility in which there are no fixed assigned positions, offering multiple options to develop the daily activity in the most appropriate way and seeking at all times to promote communication between the workers themselves and the transversality between disciplines.
With a surface area of 2,500 m2, the program is divided into three floors. In addition to the entrance, the first floor houses the main meeting room or auditorium for 60 people, while the first and second floors house the office program.
SOLUTION
Each of these floors is organized around a multipurpose space called a “square” that acts as the center of gravity, bringing together all the common activities of the office area: printing area, closets, lockers, ticketing areas, vending, restrooms and vertical communication cores.
In addition, these “squares” are connected to the canteen, creating a meeting and relationship place that promotes interaction, communication and synergies between the different workers and departments.
The work areas are organized and grouped in aligned “neighborhoods” to promote collaboration. These areas are equipped with unassigned workstations that give your employees total freedom to occupy them at any time. In this way, space and its use are optimized to the maximum. Associated with these standard workstations, there are other spaces whose configuration and furnishings allow for more flexible, agile and collaborative work.
