Don't call it an office- Zoom opens doors on London 'Engagement Hub'

Zoom has opened a new building in London it has dubbed its "Engagement Hub."

The Holborn based office will serve as a base for Zoom's 200 UK employees to operate on hybrid work schedules, balancing in-person work with remote work. Zoom said the new setup will cover roughly 15,000 square feet.

As you might imagine, a company that has made its name from allowing people to hold meetings remotely is not particularly keen on offices, so Zoom has opted to go with the "Engagement Hub" moniker.

In talking up the new office, er, Engagement Hub space, Zoom head of UK and Ireland Phil Perry said that the collaboration specialist was looking to create a space that would allow its employees to continue to operate remotely when they wanted, and in-person when necessary.

"The world of modern work has changed. Both employers and employees have experienced the benefits of a more flexible approach to work and want to use technologies like Zoom to maintain them," Perry said.

"This means more and more communication will take place across more channels, and collaboration across oceans."

Zoom claims that the facility will be no common workspace either, with what it terms "75 work points, ranging from library-style benches, touchdown spaces, agile tables for collaboration to traditional desks."

(Note: anyone who had to endure a WeWork facility in the 2010s will probably have a good, if skeptical, guess at what those terms will actually mean. We assume Zoom's building will be significantly roomier and better-equipped.)

"We are confident the state of the art design, underpinned by the full suite of Zoom technologies, will make it the perfect place for our teams to come together to do their best work on some days, while being optimised for hybrid and remote interactions leveraging the full power of the Zoom platform on other days," said Perry.  

"Today's announcement also underlines our commitment to and confidence in the UK - a key market for Zoom where we continue to see strong adoption across our entire unified communications platform encompassing virtual meetings, telephony, internal communications, online events and more."

Perry's comments will no doubt be welcome news for the UK and London in particular, where previous projects such as the ambitious East End Tech City largely failed to live up to their initial promise of creating Silicon Valley-style tech hotbeds in the UK capitol.