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Huntsman Architectural Group

Keep the Culture, Change the Workstyle

12/22/2015

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The New Aquent Headquarters

by Sandra Tripp, IIDA LEED AP and Bill Puetz, CID LEED AP
​In 1986, three Harvard undergraduates—John Chuang, Steve Kapner, and Mia Wenjen—started a desktop publishing business based out of John and Steve’s dorm room. That business grew into Aquent, a marketing, creative, and digital staffing agency with offices across the globe.

Eventually, all that growth meant Aquent’s headquarters in Boston were getting tight. We’d been planning and designing a number of regional offices in North America for the company, so they turned to us. They were spread out on four floors, which was hardly ideal. But they were reluctant to relocate to a new building, because their culture was so bound up in their existing space. We looked into options for refreshing the space. Eventually they decided not to renew their lease, forcing the issue.
So Aquent leased a single 30,000-square-foot floor in 501 Boylston Street, an Art Deco building originally constructed in 1940 and known for generations as the New England Mutual Life Insurance Company building. We held a visioning session with Aquent to identify goals to guide the relocation. We came up with six:
 
  1. The new headquarters should give Aquent all the tools they needed to work with similar-minded people and have fun.
  2. The current space was homogenous. The new headquarters should be tailored to individual work zones, providing lots of choice.
  3. The new headquarters should reinforce Aquent’s values of sharing space and resources.
  4. It should be modern, liberated from “stuff.”
  5. The materials should blend the modern and the natural.
  6. The space should be alive and energizing and make people happy every day.
Picture
​Our charge was to preserve the culture that existed in the old space, in terms of the way the space felt, while transforming the way they worked by enhancing collaboration and connection.
 
The headquarters we designed reflects the egalitarianism of the company by switching to 100 percent hoteling—there are no assigned desks here, not even for the executives. We did provide one-to-one desking—120 workstations for 120 people—with the idea that the hoteling concept would allow the space to comfortably accommodate a growing workforce.
 
Much of the building’s historic interior had been stripped in previous remodels. So we had to give the space a sense of character that would reflect the culture—not just for the people working here, but for local clients and for visiting workers from Aquent’s offices around the world. 

​To organize the large floor plate, we created a variety of destinations for working, drawing on popular building forms, each with their own feel and personality: terrace, pergola, back porch, library, general store, hut, and start-up garage.

To welcome visitors from the start, the reception desk flows into the café, creating a big public space. The café has a 20-foot-long table—Aquent has one of these in each office. They call it the harvest table. At 900 square feet, the café is big, and can be zoned into multiple areas. It’s meant to be a sort of coffee shop, where people can work at the harvest table, at movable café tables, or in four-person booths. A large meeting room can be closed off with large wooden doors as needed.
 
We detailed the space using natural materials such as timber beams, lattice panels, and oversized wood sliding doors. For example, we used real exterior grade wooden shingles to clad the huts, which contain meeting rooms that can be reserved. Phone booths are drop-in spaces for one to two people. Whiteboards are everywhere—including tabletops. Because the headquarters is 100 percent open plan, acoustic clouds all over the work areas absorb sound, and white noise provides additional sound masking. 
​For those times when people really need to concentrate, they can head to the library. Although it’s also open plan, cell phone use isn’t allowed, and all talking is to be kept to a minimum. It’s sort of like the “quiet car” on Amtrak. At the back of the library, movable bleacher seating can be reconfigured for all-hands meetings. In a tongue-in-cheek touch, we put film on the glass windows that looks like shelves of books.
 
The pergola meeting areas are accessed through a corridor with a wood slat ceiling designed to resemble a trellis. The glass walls of each room are covered with a film that looks like switchgrass.
 
The back porch is a series of semiprivate rooms where people can get away from their desk and either have an impromptu meeting or just work at their laptop in a sunny space. 
​The garage came about because they wanted a place that felt completely different from all the other spaces, but that would still function as everyday workspace. The sliding garage doors enable it to be separated from the rest of the office as needed. The standing height desks inside have butcher block tops. Just like in a real garage, people can hang things on pegboards on the walls.
 
When we went on our initial walkthrough of the space, we were told there was a room we couldn’t go into, and that it wasn’t part of the leasable space. Of course, we went into it anyway. Turned out it had a stairway that the landlords had walled off in the middle for building code reasons. It was a stairway to nowhere.
 
We asked the landlords if we could have it, if we made it code compliant, because we’d like to use it for a little hidden room, and they said yes. So we added a few sprinklers and painted the risers multiple colors. At the top of the steps, we placed off-the-shelf lockers for people to keep their belongings—especially important for a place where people don’t have assigned desks.
 
Our clients tell us the space has completely changed how they interact, and they love it: people are talking to each other, and it’s served as a great recruiting tool. It was an unusual job for us—keeping the essence of the culture, while completely changing the way everyone worked.

​Before Photos Below
Sandy Tripp and Bill Puetz are principals at Huntsman Architectural Group. Since 2007, Bill has worked with Aquent overseeing the design of multiple regional offices in North America.  Sandy's and Bill's clients include the law firms of Sheppard Mullin, Fenwick & West, and Squire Patton Boggs as well as Moody's, Vanbarton Group, and Autodesk.  Both Sandy and Bill are advocates for culture driving workplace design.
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Culture by Design

5/29/2015

 
Picture
by Sascha Wagner, IIDA CID LEED AP
swagner@huntsmanag.com
(featured in Contract magazine, May 2015)

Today’s cutting-edge office interiors for technology companies—open, creative, and amenity-rich—seem to be universally envied. This new paradigm perhaps even signals the future for traditional fields, like banking or law. Before accepting the tech office trends as the de facto basis for every future workplace, it is worth pursuing which features provide meaningful enhancements to well-being, culture, and productivity and which are just passing fads.

How tech companies really work
To understand the way tech spaces work at both a functional and cultural level, we first need to look at the drivers that have gotten us to this point in office design. Everything changed with the smartphone. Having a pocket-size supercomputer liberated the workforce from desks and office buildings. For tech-enabled workers, and indeed for most of the first-world population, the problem is no longer getting access to information or connectivity; it is filtering massive amounts of interactions.

Other drivers for tech workspaces are new collaborative and information-sharing models, including open-source product development, coworking, virtual or augmented reality, and rapid prototyping—all of which are influencing the pace of innovation and the way teams need to work now: fast, smart, connected, and collaborative. 

The design of built spaces has already been influenced by Millennials’ preference for democratic team structures, so it’s not surprising that the individual workspace is less of a status symbol. Mark Zuckerberg famously sits in the open among Facebook engineers, and many other tech CEOs don’t have assigned desks. Tech companies also use different ways to measure performance. Netflix, for example, empowers employees to largely manage their own time, provided they meet their job responsibilities. It’s what you produce, 
not where you are, that matters.


Medium photo:darrenhull.com.
Effects on the built environment
Workspaces need to reflect the priorities of those within the workforce—engaging them with meaningful encounters, motivating them by creating a sense of belonging, and encouraging their personal development—and tech companies currently seem to understand this better than others. Obviously, not every organization wants to work like a startup, but many of today’s tech spaces can teach us a lot about creating a positive culture at work. 
Here are some common features in the design of tech offices that can engage knowledge-based workers in any industry:


• Start with activity-based planning. Offering a multitude of flexible settings to support the variety of work modes that employees use during a day is essential. Not everything is done at a desk, so an open office must be augmented with meeting spaces, heads-down work areas, and places for private phone calls. Also, unless everyone spends the day with headphones on, that industrial-look exposed ceiling may lead to acoustical issues for vocal teams. 

• Prioritize “we” space over “me” space. A high value should be placed on the spaces where groups gather, especially for informal meetings. Research suggests that knowledge sharing often increases in settings other than conference rooms, such as lounges or cafes. Employees do still need a place to call their own, but the expectation is no longer that it will be large or private. Ultimately, if the communal spaces are ample and well-designed, this trade-off for personal space will not be considered a loss.

• Embed your brand. Beyond integrating images, colors, or logos, the right space can support a company’s mission and values. At Xoom’s San Francisco office, a small detail like window film tells the company’s story by depicting icons representing money moving through the international markets that Xoom serves. 

• Facilitate bonds between staff. A strong connection with colleagues is one of the primary factors for employees’ job satisfaction. Any workspace should authentically reflect and support the culture of its users, not only in the way it looks but also in the behaviors it promotes. A company should know what motivates employees to connect with one another, and a workspace interior should be designed with that in mind.
Xoom photography by Anthony Lindsey.
• Provide well-chosen amenities. If one can work anywhere, why come to the office? Rarely used gimmicks (playground slides, climbing walls, tree houses) are largely a thing of the past. But great coffee, free snacks, and even laundry service are attractive ways to engage employees. Keep fun amenities authentic, though: Don’t just add a foosball table if employees are not interested in foosball. Most importantly, adoption of any amenity starts with the company’s leaders actively using it.

• Connect with the community. Hosting after-hours presentations and workshops expands tech companies’ partnership opportunities with their neighbors. Providing public outdoor spaces or commissioning a local artist to create a mural are ways of being a good steward of the community. 
Lithium photography by Anthony Lindsey
• Focus on wellness and sustainability. Providing bike storage supports a healthier commute. A place to exercise or meditate, height-adjustable desks, good ventilation, access to daylight and outdoor spaces, and toxin-free construction materials are all essentials of a healthy workplace. Operable windows can reduce both heating and cooling costs. 

Food also plays a key role. At the office of Kaiser Permanente’s Thrive group, healthful food and snack options are supplemented with regular cooking and nutrition classes to help staff make better lifestyle choices. When employee wellness is a driver for office design, increased productivity usually follows.

While these concepts may seem like obvious positives, industries outside of tech have been slower to follow suit. Implementing collaborative design principles in traditional organizations often involves concerns about maintaining information privacy, navigating and managing regulatory requirements, and breaking down reporting structures. Since shifts in demographics and mobility will eventually affect every industry, it’s time to adapt or be left behind. Creating a more progressive workspace means asking hard questions and challenging the entrenched hierarchies and models of corporate workflow and space utilization.
Kaiser IThrive photography by Jasper Sanidad.
Understanding a company’s culture 
Workplace interior projects are ideal vehicles for organizational evolution. In partnership with clients, designers are positioned to unlock how organizations work and how they aspire to work. Carrying out a visioning process prior to design can ultimately lead clients to reassess their  organizational structures. When the discussion shifts to how physical space can support a company’s business strategy, design is an extremely powerful tool.

Each client’s solution is unique, so any design must begin with research, including quantitative programming that incorporates information on head count, group adjacencies, and growth projections, as well as qualitative analysis in a process akin to organizational anthropology. Existing work behaviors should be analyzed in tandem with an employer’s strategic objectives. With pressure to deliver projects at ever-increasing speeds, designers may be tempted to simply implement the latest trends. Clients may even ask to have their office look “more like a tech company.” But emulating others or employing partial solutions, like just converting to bench-style desks, does not yield meaningful results. Culture cannot be copied. Designers need to dive deep into a client’s organization to find the unique drivers.
Autodesk photography by Jasper Sanidad; Essence photography by Brendan Williams.
Clients expect creativity, competitive pricing, speed, technical proficiency, and competent project delivery, so designers are positioned to have the most strategic impact at the front end of the project. When a client hires a designer, one key consideration should be the designer’s ability to listen and then synthesize what they learned. Understanding an organization’s culture is a designer’s most valuable contribution.

Design is too frequently perceived as a commodity, and built space as a mere operational expense. To demonstrate tangible value, successful designers shift the conversation toward the role interiors play at a strategic level. This means emphasizing not only how a space will look or function but how people connect to it emotionally. Beyond merely looking cool, the best tech workspaces truly engage employees and amplify the organization’s culture, ultimately impacting the bottom line—and that should be the goal for every office interior as well.
Sascha Wagner, IIDA, is the president and CEO of Huntsman Architectural Group and is a past president of the IIDA  Northern California Chapter. His recent clients have included Autodesk, Credit Karma, Google, Medium, Weebly, Xoom, and YouTube. He is an editorial board member of Contract magazine.

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