A rooftop restaurant with views over Dublin city and bay, cyber cappuccino bar, fully equipped gym with personal fitness instructor and lunchtime abcruncher classes followed by a sauna - not your typical working day schedule, unless you're one of the 800 plus multi-national staff working at the Compaq Call Centre in Clonskeagh.
Not noted as a design-led sector, the phrase "chicken coops" is more often used to describe call centres, the result of the huge demand on space and facilities in this high-growth sector. But Compaq's Customer Services Centre, in Belfield Business Park, Clonskeagh, is proving to be an exception - it has been awarded two gold medals for design.
Scooping the Best Design Award at the European Call Centre event last month was a feather in the cap for the Dublin based pan-European technical support centre that is located at the former Jones Group site, now redeveloped as the Belfield Business Park, at Beaver Row, Clonskeagh, Dublin 4. The call centre is the showcase facility of the global computer giant's Irish operation and represents a £31 million investment.
Compaq occupies 160,000 sq ft of space in four of the 10 buildings at the 350,000 sq ft Belfield Business Park. Other high-profile tenants include Eircell, European Commission offices, Irish technology company Smartforce and Swedish mobile phone company Ericsson. The Belfield site is one of five Compaq operations, which include a software manufacturing facility at Ballybrit in Galway, a financial services facility at Blackrock, a technical support facility at East Point Business Park and sales and marketing along with group headquarters located at Park House, Dublin 7.
"The double-level staff canteen on the top floor, the reception area, the cyber cafe and gym, as well as the floor layout are the main focal points of the building. Compaq acquired the shell of the building, requesting to conduct the entire fit-out according to their own plans and specifications," explains Austin McCormack, facilities manager at Clonskeagh. The first phase was completed in late 1998, and the move from the temporary offices at the Delphi Centre, Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin, was completed by March last year.
Unsurprisingly, communications infrastructure is the backbone to the building. Telephone connections, contingency services and electrical specifications are the main concern for an IT support centre that is dealing with an average of 35,000 to 40,000 calls a week from across Europe. With such a huge volume of calls coming both from individual PC owners and corporations with an entire system, the 24-hour centre cannot afford to be off-line. A fire in the local area, or even a power surge could play havoc with the lines, so the building has two separate electrical feeds and power generators that kick into action if there is a break in the supply of electricity so only nonessential services suffer.
Lifts, air conditioning and other miscellaneous are classified as non-essential services.
Architect Liam Mullally, of Mullally Leonard Partnership, worked closely with Compaq to tailor the communications infrastructure to the required end use of the individual floors within the building.
Although the four blocks have been incorporated into one building, they can easily revert to the
original divisions if Compaq should have to vacate space before the end of its 25-year lease. The company elected for four individual but linked 25-year leases with a break options after 12 and 15 years. Rent on the facility amounts to around £2 million annually at £15.50 per sq ft. Two sub-levels provide 350 car-parking spaces.
Colourful Celtic-themed stained glass panels and a wall feature brighten up the spacious, white, glass-fronted double-height reception area. As befits an IT services company, everything is hi-tech with high specification multi-media facilities. Conference rooms are equipped for video conferencing, and a smart card for the staff canteen and coffee facilities makes the building a cashless zone.
The 2,000 sq ft trendy Cyber Cafe is on the second floor. It has a 55-seat capacity and eight flat screen Internet terminals with cappuccinos, espressos and other continental flavoured items on the menu for the multi-national staff. Some 55 per cent of the staff are international, with a total of 18 nationalities represented on the staff.
Adjacent to the cafe is a shop with everything from newspapers to a dry cleaning service available. "As is typical with a high percentage of business parks, there is no retail infrastructure and in this specific case the nearest shops are a 10 to 15 minute walk. Although the stock turnover or demand does not really justify a commercial existence, convenience for staff does," says Austin McCormack.
On the fifth floor is the staff canteen, which according to Mr McCormack is the showpiece of the centre. Large and spacious, with a mezzanine salad and sandwich bar, this space also doubles up as staff presentation area; it has a large screen and window shutters. The company is currently discussing the option of converting an outdoor space originally designated as a roof garden to a conservatory that would allow all year round usage.
THE floor layout design maximises space and privacy at each work station, a concept that is often hard to implement in a space driven call centre or technical support environment where specially designed headsets give staff mobility in order to seek assistance or clarification on customer queries. Work station set up has to reflect this, and in many cases, a station is shared by two or three people working different shifts.
Desks are situated at angles to each other, with one main corridor space through the floors, designed to maximise privacy so that no-one is face to face with another employee or distracted by cross telephone conversations. Dividers are also an integral part of this, but their mid-height allows an open-plan view of the office space.
"This design gives employees a sense of space. So many of these centres have staff all cooped in, back-to-back in a very stressful environment due to pressure on space. The staff numbers 800 at present with space available for 980. The low-level dividers also maximise natural light while blocking voice contact," explains architect Liam Mullally architect.
