I went to visit TESLA Motors in Fremont, CA the other day, and that gave me some interesting perspectives and inspirations for how office environments could be more inspiring and openminded!
First of all TESLA deliberately made sure that the company colors was represented in every possible way for instance their production site was a constant reminder of the TESLA color and brand. This might seem simple but actually doing it is in my perspective important for creating a common culture and a sense of community around the company and its core; the TEAM!
This press machine TESLA picked up in Detroit in around 50 trucks to press sides and other parts of the TESLA cars. As expected the machine is painted in Tesla’s colors.
The robots are painted in TESLA red, while the production floor is TESLA white and clean
The colors goes all the way up to the ceiling! Perhaps a metaphore for their explosive growth at the moment
The conference rooms was painted in Tesla colors and named by bay bridge areas
Second of all Tesla focuses on bringing the employees as close to the product as possible, they do that by for instance placing workspaces for engineers inside the production facilities in order for them to get the atmosphere and production under their skin and calculations.
Are you close enough to your products and production to leverage from the processes?
By having the engineers closer to the production TESLA is trying to minimize gaps between the two parties
Third of all Tesla tries to create an atmosphere of everybody working together by creating extremely large open office environments. According to TESLA they are breaking down the silos and traditional ways of working in the transportation industry, by working cross functional and open spaced at their office. In the office there are no walls stopping communication to float all over the space.
The spaces leave opportunities to have meeting everywhere, and must foster a lot of informal meetings and knowledge sharing
Here is the view of intense work being done on the first floor of the office space
A lot of opinions have been expressed over the years about open office environments, and yes it have its advantages and disadvantages like everything else here in life. I would love to hear your experiences both good and bad about open office environments, so leave a comment or send me an email
“Go out and change how the world works!”
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