Workplace & Site Operations Appointments for Adobe

About Adobe

Adobe is a global leader in digital media, creativity and customer experience technology, supporting millions of users and organisations worldwide. It runs its EMEA workplaces regionally, with outsourced providers delivering facilities services. Its flagship London office is at the White Collar Factory.

These are client-side leadership roles rather than hands-on ones. The appointee does not deliver services directly; they set the standard, manage the providers who do, and represent the workplace to the business.

Our work with Adobe

Maxwell Stephens has recruited two regional workplace leads for Adobe:

• Site Operations Manager, Paris & South West EMEA, a bilingual French and English role leading third-party facilities providers.
• Workplace Manager, UK & North EMEA, based at the White Collar Factory in London, covering hard and soft FM across multiple offices.

Site Operations Manager, Paris & South West EMEA

Adobe asked us to find a Site Operations Manager to provide relationship, budget and operational leadership across its Paris & South West EMEA locations, reporting to the Senior Regional Site Operations Manager for EMEA and overseeing a local team of third-party facilities service providers. Three demands defined the search:

• Leadership and relationships with employees, stakeholders and business leaders, to understand current and future needs, influence site strategy and represent local priorities credibly at a distance.
• Financial management, including clear explanation of variances between budget and actual spend and project financials.
• Delivery through outsourced providers within agreed scope, while improving service levels, cost efficiency and the employee experience.

The location added a fourth: the role required working fluently in French as well as English, with providers on the ground and a leadership team working across borders. We ran a targeted search rather than an advertised one, looking for leaders with hard and soft services experience and a record of managing outsourced providers against SLAs and KPIs, and tested interpersonal skill, strategic thinking and financial discipline directly rather than assuming them from a CV.

The appointee brought over 5 years of FM experience across hard and soft services and standard SLAs and KPIs, strong interpersonal and communication skills, financial stewardship, and fluency in French and English for leadership meetings and employee all-hands. The appointment exceeded Adobe's expectations.

"Throughout a long and detailed recruitment process, Peter’s professional and supportive approach was greatly appreciated. He kept me informed through regular updates and calls, while being clear, approachable and transparent."

Workplace Manager, UK & North EMEA

As its operations expanded across the UK and North EMEA, Adobe needed a Workplace Manager based at the White Collar Factory to lead workplace operations and deliver a consistent employee experience across multiple offices. The role covered:

• workplace operations across the UK and North EMEA region
• hard and soft facilities services, with consistent delivery across locations
• health, safety and compliance
• supplier relationships and outsourced service providers
• operational budgets and value for money
• workplace projects, office improvements and organisational growth
• partnering with internal functions including Security and Workplace Experience
• employee satisfaction and engagement

Regional workplace roles tend to be recruited on facilities credentials alone; the influencing and commercial elements usually decide whether the appointment succeeds. We worked with Adobe's leadership team on the operational demands and cultural attributes required, then searched for professionals who had led workplace operations across regional or international portfolios. Candidates were assessed on technical expertise, leadership, cultural fit and alignment of workplace strategy with business goals, with particular attention to outsourced providers, workplace projects, compliance programmes and employee experience initiatives.

The appointee brought a strong record of delivering facilities and workplace services across complex corporate environments and quickly established effective relationships across the portfolio, taking responsibility for facilities operations and supplier management, employee experience, financial control and stakeholder relationships across the UK and North EMEA.

Why it worked

Multi-site EMEA roles go wrong when they are recruited as facilities jobs with a language or regional requirement attached. Both searches treated leadership, financial discipline and supplier management as the core of the brief, assessed commercial judgement and stakeholder influence as rigorously as hard and soft services knowledge, and, for Paris, treated bilingual capability as non-negotiable.

Read more about our Workplace Management Recruitment Services, or if you are recruiting a site, workplace or regional operations lead, get in touch with our team.