Built from the Ground Up: Announcing Workday’s New Headquarters

When I joined Workday seven years ago, all of our local employees were in one building. Fast forward to today, and we now have 10 buildings across our Workday campus in Pleasanton, Calif., and almost 11,000 employees globally. To see this tremendous growth is incredibly inspiring, and I’m excited to share the latest update on our presence in Pleasanton.

Today we’re celebrating the opening of our new headquarters at 6110 Stoneridge Mall Road with a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Our senior management team is attending along with leaders from the city of Pleasanton and Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), which we partnered with on improvements throughout the area that benefit the local community.

Inspired by our core values, we were able to design our new headquarters from the ground up, with a focus on creating a great workplace and center of innovation in support of our number one core value—employees. And because our customers are our partners in innovation, our headquarters will also be home to the new 16,000-square-foot Workday Customer Center, scheduled to open this summer.

Here’s a closer look at our new headquarters:

The 410,000-square-foot, six-story building was designed with a primary goal in mind: to encourage collaboration. With space to accommodate 2,200 employees, we’re able to support our core value of innovation by bringing many of our product and technology employees under one roof.

We’ve created an ideal environment for agile software development, including many open spaces, whole walls of traditional whiteboards, new high-tech tools including digital whiteboards and video walls, and four great rooms, which were made to feel like living rooms where large groups of employees can come together.  

Like the rest of the building, the new Workday Customer Center is designed to enable collaboration with our current and prospective customers and includes suites to provide them with an intimate and customized setting for their visits.

With fun as another core value, we wanted to create an environment that supports everyone’s need to take breaks from work. Employees can meet or relax while surrounded by indoor trees in our open spaces or in one of the large game rooms located on every floor. There are wellbeing rooms, therapeutic massage services, showers, and lockers (our gym is next door in building 6000). The Data Diner, opening in June, will have a large pizza oven and a variety of food stations.  

There’s also generous outdoor space and an open-air amphitheater with seating for 1,500 people. And, as a pet-friendly company, we have two dog runs for our canine family members’ play and exercise.

At Workday, we’re passionate about the environment and are committed to doing our part to reduce humankind’s carbon footprint. In support of this, we constructed the property to achieve Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum certification, the highest level possible, meaning it meets robust requirements for sustainable design and construction.

The building uses a cool roof to mitigate the urban heat island effect, while a large, 865-kilowatt solar array provides up to one-third of the building’s daily electricity needs. We’ve also installed an innovative onsite greywater recycling system that will save up to 720,000 gallons of water annually.

The construction of 6110 Stoneridge Mall Road involved strong collaboration with the City of Pleasanton and BART, including investments in public safety that Workday helped fund. A police service center operated by both Pleasanton and BART police will open in June. Throughout the area, there are new outdoor walkways, and new traffic lights and road improvements for traffic flow and safety.

We’re extremely grateful to the City of Pleasanton and BART for their partnership and appreciate opportunities to give back to the community, while also creating more local jobs with our continued growth and investment in the area.

It’s because of their partnership, in addition to our work with the building’s general contractor, DPR Construction; the architect and designer, Gensler; and literally hundreds of additional vendors that we’ve been able to make our beautiful new headquarters a reality.

And we’d also like to thank our employees, who through their feedback and input starting well before we first broke ground, have helped us create another great place to work.