Case Study · Singtel

Hybrid
Workplace

Designing the future of work at Singtel — where physical space, digital tools, and human behaviour meet.

Case study being expanded

Context

Work was changing.
The experience of it
needed to catch up.

The pandemic accelerated a shift that was already underway — employees were no longer anchored to fixed desks, fixed hours, or fixed ways of collaborating. For Singtel, this created both an opportunity and an obligation: to rethink what the workplace experience should feel like in a hybrid world, and to ensure that the digital tools and physical spaces supporting employees were coherent, intuitive, and human.

The Future of Workplace initiative was Singtel's response to this shift. As Experience Design Lead, I was brought in to shape the digital track — working across product, facilities, HR, and technology teams to design experiences that bridged the gap between how people wanted to work and what the organisation was equipped to provide.

This was not a product redesign. It was a design leadership challenge — navigating competing stakeholder priorities, surfacing unmet employee needs, and helping the organisation think about workplace experience as a continuous practice rather than a one-time project.

Designing for hybrid work means designing for uncertainty — and building systems that can adapt as the way people work continues to evolve.

Scope

A connected
ecosystem of experiences.

The initiative spanned multiple workstreams, each touching a different dimension of the hybrid workplace. Rather than treating these as separate projects, the design approach sought to create coherence across them — a consistent experience logic that made the whole feel greater than the sum of its parts.

Employee App
BIG Connect — the unified front door to workplace services
Workspace Reservation
Booking desks, rooms, and collaborative spaces with ease
Visitor Management
Streamlined arrival experiences for guests and external partners

The Brief

Four tensions
at the heart of
hybrid work.

01
Physical and digital, still in silos Facilities teams owned the spaces. IT teams owned the tools. Neither had a complete picture of the employee experience — and employees felt the gaps every day.
02
Expectations shifting faster than readiness Employees had developed new habits and expectations around flexibility. The organisation's processes, policies, and tools were catching up — not leading.
03
Flexibility without connection Hybrid models risked optimising for individual convenience at the cost of the serendipitous, cultural, and relational dimensions of being in a workplace together.
04
Multiple stakeholders, multiple definitions of success HR, Facilities, IT, and business leadership each had a legitimate but distinct view of what a better workplace should look like. Design had to hold these perspectives together.

Approach

Designing across
boundaries.

The design process began with research — speaking with employees across different roles, functions, and working styles to understand not just their frustrations, but the rhythms and rituals of their working day. What did a good day at the office feel like? What made hybrid working feel disconnected? These conversations shaped a set of employee insights that became the shared reference point across all workstreams.

Service blueprinting helped make the invisible visible — mapping out the full experience of reserving a space, arriving as a visitor, or accessing a workplace service, including all the behind-the-scenes processes and dependencies that shaped what employees actually experienced. This cross-functional view was often the first time teams from different functions had seen their work in relation to each other.

Throughout, the design role was as much about convening and aligning as it was about designing. Regular working sessions with stakeholders from Facilities, HR, IT, and business teams kept the work grounded in organisational reality while pushing toward a more coherent, human-centred vision.

Contribution

Spanning strategy,
research, and craft.

This project asked for breadth — the ability to move between high-level experience strategy and detailed interaction design, while continuously translating between what employees needed and what the organisation could realistically deliver.

Experience Strategy Service Design Employee Research Systems Thinking UX Design Cross-functional Collaboration Design Leadership

Outcomes

What the work
made possible.

A shared vision for hybrid work Cross-functional teams aligned around a common set of experience principles — a foundation that guided decisions across the initiative and beyond.
Cohesive reservation and visitor experiences Workspace reservation and visitor management were designed as part of a connected experience ecosystem, not as isolated tools.
Bridging physical and digital Design principles were established to guide decisions across both spatial and digital touchpoints — moving the organisation toward a more integrated view of workplace experience.
Stronger cross-functional relationships Working across Facilities, HR, IT, and business functions built trust and a shared vocabulary around employee experience that outlasted individual project deliverables.

Reflection

On designing
for spaces between.

Hybrid workplace design sits at an uncomfortable intersection — between the physical and the digital, between individual preference and collective culture, between what technology can enable and what organisations are ready to change. It is a domain where the hardest design problems are not interface problems at all.

What I found most challenging — and most interesting — was the work of helping people from different functions develop a shared mental model of the employee experience. Facilities teams thought in terms of utilisation rates and spatial efficiency. IT teams thought in terms of systems integration and uptime. HR teams thought in terms of culture and wellbeing. Each lens was valid. The design work was, in part, about finding a language that made these perspectives legible to each other.

I also came away with a deeper appreciation for the limits of digital design in workplace contexts. No amount of interface polish compensates for a policy that doesn't work, a process that creates friction, or a culture that hasn't fully committed to flexibility. The best digital experiences are the ones that make good organisational decisions visible — not the ones that paper over the absence of them.

The measure of a workplace experience isn't how seamless it feels on a good day — it's how well it holds up on the days when things don't go to plan.

Work in progress — This case study is being progressively documented. Additional details, artefacts, and outcomes will be added over time. What's here reflects how I approach complex, cross-functional design challenges — and what I've learned from working at the intersection of people, organisations, and the spaces they inhabit.