Client companies that truly know their identity, and are able to fuse their culture into every facet of company life, are harder to come by than one might think. Many companies have broad-scale values and a loosely articulated perception of who they are, but they lack a distinct singularity in culture that defines who they really are and how they operate. These companies often end up discovering a lot about themselves during the course of their collaboration with architects and designers for a new workplace.
DriveTime, a large used car dealer and financing company that helps people with credit issues find and finance vehicles, is not one of those companies. Its new headquarters are a picture-perfect reflection of the company itself – because it knows its identity. The leadership team at DriveTime has always pushed a close partnership with its employees on all levels of the company, and so it knew exactly what it needed its workplace to be.
This quality is too rare in a landscape of talent retention woes and constant pressure of delivering the highest possible value to customers. In its collaboration with exterior architect Butler Group and interior design firm Phoenix Design One, DriveTime cut to the quick in dictating its needs and wants for its new offices.
DriveTime shatters traditional notions of what a used car dealer can be, operating within a progressive startup-like culture that is more than willing to embrace new workplace design concepts. In the growing tech hub of Tempe, AZ, the company opted to build a brand new two-story building in a business park with mountain views.
In the new space, it sought to continue the industrial aesthetic of its previous headquarters, a large converted warehouse space that enjoyed a previous life as a grocery store. The new offices feature a neutral palette of materials and surfaces punctuated by pops of color and a sprinkle of commissioned art pieces and quirky furniture.
DriveTime is big on transparency, and the amount of glass they used to express that is unprecedented; around 90,000 square feet of clear floor-to-ceiling glass frames each conference room and other enclosed spaces.
Lack of conferencing options was a big issue in the former headquarters, and the new 97,000 square foot facility houses a whopping total of 42 conference rooms. Each room has a large-scale writable wall and features a name chosen from a company-wide conference room naming contest. Names such as Think, Revolution, 360°, Avant Garde, Aha, and even Friction, are displayed on the glass front of each conference room, accompanied by punchy graphics.
DriveTime pushed for an uncommon layout featuring conferencing and social spaces pushed outward toward the perimeter, with open desking filling the interior of the space. This is the opposite of many current design solutions that place individual workstations on the perimeter in order to provide end users with as much daylight as possible.
But DriveTime stuck to its guns because it wanted to preserve the employees’ ability to stand up from their desk and find coworkers easily across the space.
“In our old building, you could stand up and find somebody at anytime,” said Erika Nunley, real estate paralegal at DriveTime. “We wanted to keep that, so we pushed the conference rooms to the windows and left in the inner space open.”
Every employee has the exact same size workspace in the open office interior, where even the company CEO sits.
One new addition to the space is the presence of open collaboration areas that allow people to sync up without being enclosed in a conference room. DriveTime employees can now work away from their desks in a diverse collection of spaces. And as progressive as the company is, its new space still manages to push the boundaries of how employees are used to working.
“People had to get used to using the open collaborative spaces,” said Chris Piper, assistant director of market strategy at DriveTime. “It took people a while to think, ‘I can go work on that couch this afternoon if I want to.’ That was a big adjustment.”
Phoenix Design One worked closely with each DriveTime department to design the desking solutions.
While every employee has the exact same size workspace in the open office interior, where even the company CEO sits, the desking configurations differ for each department according to their needs. 50% of the workstations are height-adjustable, and some desks can roll so that people who work between departments can easily join up with different teams.
Three stairways make up the main form of transportation between floors – a main lobby stairway and one on either end of the building – which gets employees moving throughout the day.
DriveTime employees also requested a big bump up in amenities. The new offices feature a large kitchen with extensive food options, an outdoor patio with two grills and indoor/outdoor amphitheater seating, a game room with two ping pong tables (ping pong is big at DriveTime), and an expansive fitness center that has been getting a lot more action, helping employees reach their fitness goals as part of a wellness program the company introduced.