BlaBlaCar’s new headquarters in the age of remote work

After two years of Covid, we inaugurated our new headquarters in the heart of Paris, designed to suit the new hybrid way of working. Investing in a new HQ might sound paradoxical when you’ve just made remote work the norm. But here’s why it’s not.

Designing an office for 2022

Covid-19 has profoundly changed the way people work; and it has presented BlaBlaCar with an opportunity to design a new model of working and what we believe an office should look like in 2022.

In the last two years, we’ve found that many of our employees embrace remote working for individual productivity and work-life balance. In fact, we’ve seen employee satisfaction only increase since this added flexibility. But we’ve also found that coming together in person is fundamental for social connection, team spirit and even performance.

The challenge for us was to create a model that brings together these two goals: giving people the choice to work from anywhere, while creating a space to regroup and connect. We designed our new headquarters as a hybrid space that serves our new remote policy, is in line with our commitment toward sustainability, and gives people the freedom to choose the set-up that works for them, while allowing us to optimize our resources and office space.

BlaBlaNomad: the freedom to choose

If there is something the last few years have taught us, it’s that the more flexible a company, the more resilient it is. So, we strive to offer BlaBlaCar employees the highest level of flexibility when it comes to remote work.

Our policy, called BlaBlaNomad, relies on two approaches: working full-remote or working hybrid. Although remote work pre-dates covid for certain roles at BlaBlaCar, it was accelerated by the crisis and generalized for all employees into a bold, flexible policy built around the individual needs of our employees, but also keeping in mind collective performance and team spirit.

Today, employees at BlaBlaCar have the choice to become fully remote in the country they are employed in. Each remote employee has a budget to set up their home office in the location of their choice, but also to come to the office once a month for at least 3 days in a row. We have increased the focus on team buildings, providing more budget to managers so that they can invest in quality time for the teams to connect. Office-wide events are organized on a regular basis, in conjunction with those team buildings, so that everyone can come together at around the same time.

In France, 26% of our employees are now full-remote across 96 cities and covering all French regions, compared to only a handful pre-covid. In the Engineering team, that number goes beyond 40%. In order to connect with colleagues even far from Paris, some of the employees have joined coworking spaces together in several large cities, creating “BlaBlaCar hubs” in Nantes (10 people) or in Lyon (7 people) for example.

In addition to going full-remote, employees also have the choice to go hybrid: they can choose to go to the office once, twice, or five times a week. “Team days” are organized by managers on a weekly basis for teams to get together, and weekly events are organized by our Engagement Team for people to socialize with other teams, such as our Thursday afterwork in the Paris office, or Tuesday brunches in Warsaw.

BlaBlaCar HQ: a social hub

We no longer see the office as a place for people to sit in front of a desk and work all day. With employees coming at their own pace, time spent at the office is rare, but more intense: devoted to meeting up, working together or socializing, and creating informal social connections that are essential to team spirit, employee well-being, and to running the company.

With 5,000 square meters spread over 5 floors, the new headquarters offer a range of amenities for people to connect, work, relax: a 170-seat auditorium, the BlaBlaCafé, fitness and yoga rooms, a music studio, a game area, a bicycle garage, and a rooftop with a 360° view of Paris, a basketball court and a vegetable garden.

The open spaces and meeting rooms are designed to be 100% flexible based on the “flex office” principle. To rationalize the use of space in a context where remote work is now the norm, the number of workstations used by BlaBlaCar has been reduced to 200 and square footage down by 25%. Desks can be reserved according to the needs of employees via a digital management system, and an additional 200 workstations are to be subleased to other companies.

Sustainability: walking the talk

As a carbon-saving travel network with a strong commitment toward sustainability, it’s important to walk the talk when it comes to office life. With the architects we had a common vision to make the BlaBlaCar headquarters the gold standard of sustainable architecture.

The construction complied with the most demanding energy and environmental criteria, with over 75% of building waste having been recycled, and carefully chosen materials: wood, metal, stone, with very few plastics. The building was awarded the BREEAM International “Very Good” and Wiresdscore Silver environmental performance labels, and the green garden and rooftop were designed with the assistance of an ecologist to enhance the development of biodiversity and improve air quality. They also contribute to reinforcing the insulation and thermal inertia of the top floors of the building.

Beyond construction, the operations were also designed to be efficient and environmentally-friendly: calibration of lighting by zone according to natural light, storage of rainwater, no use of detergents thanks to an osmosis water station, zero-waste connected refrigerators, sorting and reuse of all waste, etc. By January 2023, the building will be 100% powered by renewable energy.

Finally, being located in the central Bastille district with close proximity to public transport and a 80-space bicycle garage, the hope is to encourage people to come to work using public transport or soft mobility. Today, one third of employees come to work either by foot or bike.

Concluding thoughts

Our ambition at BlaBlaCar is that this hybrid model sets a new standard for the corporate workplace: one that empowers employees to make their own choices, fosters their well-being, keeps team spirit up and performance high, whether online or offline.

While Covid was a major accelerator of change, the transition toward flexibility and hybrid working was not as radical as one might think. For three main reasons: the nature of BlaBlaCar’s workforce, as a global company that has always worked across offices and timezones, but also as an asset-light software company with 55% of employees in R&D. Second, our strong culture of performance, rooted in trust, transparency and holding people accountable, and which is in no way tied to physical presence.

And finally, because our work culture is consistent with the values we find in carpooling: flexibility and trust. As much as these values are central to our activity, they are inherent in our culture and workplace too.