Vice Media

Vice Media

"Everything clicked together with desks. It was perfect timing as people came back into the office. I can’t imagine welcoming employees without Envoy."

"Everything clicked together with desks. It was perfect timing as people came back into the office. I can’t imagine welcoming employees without Envoy."

Rosie McNeel

Rosie McNeel

Senior Director of Global Facilities Management at Vice Media

Senior Director of Global Facilities Management at Vice Media

Location

New York City

Industry

Media

Employees

1250

Locations

5

Products

Desks, Rooms, Deliveries, Visitors, Protect

Vice Media Group makes thought-provoking content while streamlining the employee office experience

Challenges

• Needed desk booking for hybrid workforce
• Wanted a better way for employees to coordinate coming into the office
• Needed visibility on tracking return to office initiatives

Results

• Seamless desk booking on familiar Envoy platform
• Neighborhoods enable people on the same team or functional project to sit together
• Analytics provides information on how to manage flexible work

Vice Media Group makes thought-provoking content while streamlining the employee office experience

Every week, Vice Media Group produces over 2,400 pieces of content in 25 languages. A lot goes into managing its daily onsite operations with its thousands of employees around the world. Vice Media Group turned to Envoy to streamline the daily office experience for 1250 of its people across 5 global offices, so employees can focus on producing content without missing a beat.

Optimizing the employee office experience

Rosie McNeel, Senior Director of Global Facilities Management, describes Vice Media Group’s Brooklyn HQ as “a maze of floor plans–we have a very unique space! We have production spaces, post-production rooms, and desks with various types of equipment for different teams.”

McNeel appreciated how easy it was to customize desk and room setup according to Vice Media Group’s specifications so teams can easily find the right space they need to get work done. The office offers monitors, standing desks, iMacs and more, which McNeel plans to add into the Envoy platform so employees can filter available desks by amenities. Employees can also book the right sized conference rooms for meetings.

Configuring neighborhoods when setting up desks was a standout feature for the Vice Media Group team. Employees can see where colleagues are sitting on the map in the Envoy mobile app, which makes collaboration easier. “We make sure people are sitting with people they work closest with, while also being flexible,” says McNeel. “As the person who set up neighborhoods, it’s great to know I can easily change space settings to adapt to our employee feedback.”

A familiar workplace platform with added functionality

McNeel already knew about Envoy when she used it as a guest visiting other companies, and Vice Media Group has been using its Visitor management system in its Berlin office since 2017. But with Envoy’s additional product releases for Desks, Rooms and Deliveries, McNeel saw the value of using all of these together on one connected workplace platform. “It’s made it so much easier for our team to manage what used to be clunky processes. In the past, we would manually scan packages and keep track of that in a spreadsheet. We also knew we needed desk booking for our hybrid workforce, and other products we considered were more expensive and not as intuitive to use. Envoy products have solved our ‘clunkiness.’”

McNeel and her team designated desk, room and delivery areas in Vice Media Group’s 5 largest offices. With Envoy’s integration with Okta, Vice Media Group could sync employee details with just a few clicks and assign them by department and vertical to desired locations. “Once synced, setting up the platform and configuring Desks and Deliveries was so easy to do,” recalls McNeel. “It only took a day or two to set up as an admin, since it’s an intuitive platform.”

Responding to current and future space needs

McNeel and her team rely on Envoy’s analytics and reporting to keep a pulse on how people are using office space. Every week, McNeel reviews the report for Vice Media Group’s three largest offices in New York, Los Angeles and London, which gives her digestible insights to share with Vice Media Group’s Chief People Officer. These include metrics around how many employees are registering for onsite work, desk usage and more. They might decide anywhere from decreasing or increasing office capacity to respond to local guidelines, or reconfiguring certain desk neighborhoods based on Envoy data and employee feedback. An additional bonus is how McNeel can use the charts and graphs straight from the desk analytics dashboard when she presents to leadership, without having to build them herself.

“Envoy is providing us information that we never had before,” says McNeel. “We didn’t have a great way to know which teams were coming in on which days, and we would have to figure it out in a more manual fashion. By frequently keeping an eye on this data we can easily adapt, as our office transitions into a steady state of long term hybrid work.”

Improving employees’ daily office routines

Ultimately, McNeel sees Envoy as key for helping Vice Media Group employees manage their days in the office. Instead of signing into three different places, they use the Envoy mobile app to book desks and rooms, invite visitors and pick up their packages.

“Change management is difficult,” says McNeel. “And Envoy is a one-stop shop for our employees to manage their day to day in the office. The mobile app is so intuitive. I know that for employees to adopt a new habit, it has to be straight-forward and easy to use in order to click with employees.”

As Vice Media Group continues producing thought-provoking content as news breaks, McNeel and her team continue making improvements for a seamless onsite experience. She notes that combining visitors, delivery and desk management with Envoy made returning to the office not only easier, but also fun.

“Employees were excited to come back to the office,” says McNeel, “and having a cool new mobile app that streamlined processes was an attractive benefit. It was an improvement to make workplace life easier that our employees didn’t have before, so we could say ‘We’ve improved three different processes for you!’ when they walk back in the door.”

Challenges

• Needed desk booking for hybrid workforce
• Wanted a better way for employees to coordinate coming into the office
• Needed visibility on tracking return to office initiatives

Results

• Seamless desk booking on familiar Envoy platform
• Neighborhoods enable people on the same team or functional project to sit together
• Analytics provides information on how to manage flexible work