Lila Group has realized its new office dream which supports family, development, trust, quality and responsibility values supported by healthy life and environment, with Bakırküre Architecture and SPM Project Management cooperation.
Lila Group and Bakırküre Architecture joined forces for a more sustainable office. Talking about the sustainable and enjoyable new offices, Banu Yaran Kılıç, Lila Group corporate Communication Manager, and Burcu Öğücü Giritli, Private Brands Sales Coordinator, detailed the differences of old system offices and new generation offices.
What is Lila Group? Could you please briefly tell us about your company?
The origins of the Lila Group go back to about 100 years ago. The foundations of the company were laid through the “Çırçır ve Dokumacılık” (Gining and Weaving) company founded by Hasan Öğücü and his sons in 1930In line with the needs of the country, Lila Group headed towards the areas with high added value that require advanced technology as of the 2000s and entered the energy sector in 2005. In 2005, Lila Group founded ‘Lila Tissue’ with a fully national capital to meet the rapidly evolving needs of Turkey in the hygiene tissue paper market. Commencing its operations in 2007 with the mission of producing hygiene tissue papers at global standards, Lila Tissue continues its journey in an area of 140,000 m2 with a capacity of 150,000 ton by means of its new investments completed in 2012. Operating as the biggest paper manufacturing facility under a single campus in Eastern Europe, Turkey, Caucasus and MENA regions (between Poland and China), Lila Tissue currently holds a total market share of 12 percent in Turkey’s hygiene tissue papers market, which is worth of about 2 billion Turkish Liras.
What are the reasons for opening a new office?
Lila Group has constantly grown since the day it was founded, and this constant growth started to occupy our agenda frequently. Today, we are exporting to 77 countries throughout 5 continents. Therefore, our office in Tekstilkent could no longer meet our needs in terms of location, physical and technological infrastructure. By moving our office to Business Istanbul located in Kadıköy, which is much closer to the city center, we wanted to provide our employees an environment-friendly, technological and comfortable space. According to a research conducted by Nowa Style Group, 74.3 percent of the employees give importance to the office environment and design in their selection of job. In order to determine the needs and demands, we established the Lila Group Project Committee and conducted several feasibility studies in cooperation with Bakırküre Architects. We started the project by receiving feedback on the necessary changes, demands, improvement areas and expectations through the surveys and workshops conducted with the participation of Lila Group’s employees from all levels and ages. Through our new office designed with the desire to create a new work environment, we aimed to offer an office environment where both the current and potential members of the Lila Family would be pleased to work for a long term.
What are the differences between your old and new office?
We have designed our new office as an open office where teams and their managers can actively work together. I think this is our most radical change. We have also supported this layout with social spaces that increase the communication within the company and make it possible to work with fun. We have blended our design elements in social spaces with fun and developmental games. We have frequently included live plants in our new office to reflect and support the traces of nature. For the complete design of our office, we have chosen the most natural and recyclable materials such as plaza with Leed Platinum certificate. In accordance with our sustainability vision, we have named our meeting rooms by trees. In addition, we have developed the meeting rooms with a comprehensive infrastructure based on easy and fast use and designed them in a way to meet the different needs in different square meters and different person capacity. We have created a spacious open office with a layout plan that aims to provide equal access to daylight for all of our employees.
What are the values that you have prioritized while designing your new office?
We set out with the dream of creating a new office that supports healthy living, environmentalism and sustainability on top of our corporate values, which are namely Family, Development, Trust, Quality and Responsibility, that convey our corporate philosophy we have adopted and internalized for many years as Lila Group. Our top concern is employee well-being. We have a young and dynamic team. Therefore, we decided to reflect this dynamism on our office as well. We materialized these values we embrace through design and brought them into life as the living visual communication elements within the office. After identifying the messages that can motivate the Lila Group team by conducting the workshops, we worked along with Federation, an expert company in its field, on the office claddings that are an integral part of office design and created a colorful, pleasant and corporate culture.
From a technological point of view, what is your most innovative move?
According to the “Future Workforce” study, 82 percent of respondents stated that technology is quite important in their selection of workplaces. Benefiting from today’s latest technology, we have designed an environment-friendly and dynamic space that facilitates our lives. However, we have not given up on our sustainability approach and sensitivity to the environment and nature in these designs. Through the efficient use of automation systems, we have focused on the minimum energy consumption in the office. All the details from lighting to air conditioner and from acoustics to security, which are quite important for the comfort of our employees, have been designed under the guidance of expert designers and consultants and supported by the current technological infrastructure. Thus, we could make use of today’s technology and facilities and achieve efficiency.
