06 September 2019 | Martin Read
Global services company Sodexo has appointed workplace specialist So Young Hyun as its workplace experience leader.
She is the first person to be assigned to Wx, the group's workplace experience consultancy in the UK and Ireland.
Wx is a fully owned subsidiary of Sodexo and helps to improve its clients' workplace experience through ethnography, IoT and data science. In her new role, So Young will support the strategic development of Wx's business in the UK and Ireland, while simultaneously developing Sodexo's workplace offer as a member of its business development team.
Yannick Villar, CEO and co-founder of Wx, said: "The UK and Ireland workplace market, especially in London and Dublin, is strategic for Wx given its maturity. The experience So Young brings will help us transform these opportunities and create more value for our clients. This is a critical first step in our planned investment in this market and in other key business cities around the world."
So Young has more than 15 years' experience in workplace strategy, environmental science, sustainable design and building optimisation. She joins Sodexo from Mitie, where she was responsible for driving the strategic development and operational delivery of its workplace proposition. Before this, she worked at global engineering firm Arup at its London head office.
She is an experienced designer and a chartered engineer and has an MA in architecture from the University of Seoul and an MSc in environmental design and engineering from University College London. She carried out her doctoral research on bridging the performance gap in buildings through life-cycle building information management at the UCL Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering.
So Young said: "I am a believer in the potential for great workplace experience. By pairing human perception with new sensor-based data inputs and machine learning algorithms we can reach new levels of building design and operational performance, delivering solutions that truly deliver for people and organisations. I am also passionate about complementing sustainable building practices with science-based insights and leveraging emerging technologies to enhance human experience and wellbeing."
Jason Bottomley, business development director of corporate services, Sodexo UK & Ireland, adds: "So Young brings a tremendous level of experience and research in the field of workplace experience and will drive forward our approach, connecting our traditional IFM capability with Wx's data-driven consultancy to provide next-generation workplace experience solutions for our clients."