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Employee experience starts long before someone sits at their desk. The People team explains how involving employees in shaping their workplace has created stronger collaboration, deeper engagement, and an award-winning office experience.
A well-designed workplace can do far more than improve aesthetics. When employees have a say in shaping the spaces where they work, it can strengthen collaboration, foster a greater sense of belonging, and encourage innovation across the organisation.
That is the philosophy behind Changi Airport Group's (CAG) workplace transformation. Through its two major spaces, Terminal X and Changi Axis, the organisation has intentionally designed environments around how people work, learn, and connect, while involving employees throughout the journey to ensure the spaces truly meet their needs.
Soon after CAG clinched the bronze award for 'Most Innovative and Sustainable Office Design' at the Employee Experience Awards 2026, Singapore, the People team reflects on how HR teams can help workplaces adapt to evolving employee expectations. As hybrid and multi-generational work becomes the norm, it notes that organisations will need to create more flexible, personalised environments that support different ways of working while continuously refining workplace experiences to meet changing needs.
Read the full interview.
Q Tell us about the biggest insight or lesson that influenced your Employee Experience (EX) approach this past year.
At Changi Airport Group (CAG), one of our biggest insights is that exceptional employee experience is not created by design aesthetics alone, but also in intentionally designing workplaces around how people work, learn and connect.
Through our award‑winning spaces – Terminal X and Changi Axis, we saw how purpose‑built, people‑centred environments can actively shape behaviours, strengthen collaboration, deepen belonging, and accelerate innovation. When employees are involved in co‑creating their environment, and when spaces are continuously activated with meaning and purpose, the workplace becomes a strategic enabler of both employee experience and organisational transformation.
Q How did you bring leaders, managers, and employees together to support the execution and success of the initiative?
Collaboration and co‑creation were embedded at every stage of our workplace transformation journey. We made sure to engage in discussions with senior management early, to ensure alignment with business priorities, while managers and employees alike participated in design workshops, focus group discussions and engagement sessions to find out what they needed and wanted out of their workplace. Topics covered at these sessions ranged from physical space transformation (e.g., types of furniture) to new ways of working (e.g., transitioning to an activity-based workplace model).
Employees also contributed directly through hands‑on activities such as furniture selection, community room idea-pitching, meeting‑room naming and post‑move feedback. This inclusive, ground‑up approach built strong ownership, sustained buy‑in, and helped both Terminal X and Changi Axis succeed as living platforms for innovation, learning and community.
Q What challenge behind the scenes tested your team the most, and what did it teach you about building stronger employee experience programmes?
Perhaps the biggest challenge was change management. Moving from a conventional office environment to a more open, flexible and activity-based workplace can create uncertainty around new norms, shared spaces, and ways of collaborating.
For CAG, this reinforced an important lesson: strong employee experience programmes are not built by aesthetics or design alone, but by sustained change management, employee involvement, and continuous activation.
By engaging employees early through co-creation efforts and post-move feedback, we learned that people are far more likely to embrace transformation when they feel heard, are involved and supported throughout the journey.
Q As you reflect on the journey, what this recognition at the Employee Experience Awards 2026 mean to you and your team?
Winning the bronze award for 'Most Innovative and Sustainable Office Design' at the Employee Experience Awards 2026 is a proud affirmation of the collective passion, thought and effort behind Terminal X and Changi Axis. More than recognising a physical transformation, it affirms our belief that employee experience can be a strategic enabler of culture and transformation when it is intentionally designed around people’s needs.
For the team behind Terminal X and Changi Axis, it would be a proud acknowledgement that our work has helped create an environment where employees can connect, learn, experiment and create ‘magic’ together – new products, services and innovative breakthroughs.
Q Finally, as employee expectations continue to evolve, what is one area of EX you believe HR teams will need to rethink in the year ahead?
Where workplace experience is concerned, one area HR teams could continue to rethink is how to make the workplace more responsive to evolving employee expectations around flexibility, focus and personalisation. As work becomes increasingly hybrid, multi‑generational and task‑based, employees value not just collaborative spaces, but greater choice in how and where they work - whether for deep focus, informal connection, virtual collaboration or quiet recharge. This requires HR teams to keep refining how newly transformed workspaces are activated, used and iterated over time, so they remain relevant as needs evolve.
Read more interviews on why organisations have won trophies for their HR practices - head over to our Winning Secrets section!
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