Real estate is a huge financial burden to companies of every size. And the larger the company, the larger the financial burden is. Corporate clients constantly feel pressure to reevaluate their real estate assets, and to ensure they’re putting the right pieces together for their employees and everyone else they interact with.
To get a sense of how design firms are tackling large corporate restructuring projects, we spoke with the Corporate Services studio of A&D firm Dyer Brown.
Dyer Brown’s Corporate Services studio helps clients with significant workplace footprints that either have multiple buildings or many offices nationally, or both. These clients are often long-term, with three-to-five year minimum contracts, and require renovations to existing offices and/or design development of new office locations.
“Our Corporate Services clients are often looking to us for workplace trends, and the know-how behind how they’re using their spaces currently, and what they could or should be doing,” said Tara Martin, principal/director of client services at Dyer Brown. “Sometimes it begins with a single project or a series of smaller projects; they might first come to us for more rigid real estate reasons. But they’re often working through larger issues like talent retention.
Design firms focusing on large corporate clients must offer them valuable workplace strategies to stay ahead of the curve.
“A main concern for our larger clients is employee satisfaction – more employees can lead to having less control over things like company culture, differences in departmental work environments and management styles,” said Sara Ross, director of Corporate Services at Dyer Brown. “Big changes like a new CEO, an economic downturn, or new acquisitions are also things that should be considered when planning and designing for the future.”
“There are many layers there. In addition to their like-size competitors, large corporations are competing with startups and smaller companies. They’re looking to us to help them keep up with those more agile work environments, and as a knowledge source for national workplace trends. We’re also providing a lot of research-based workplace health and wellbeing knowledge. And those needs all relate to each other; it’s a circle.”
Dyer Brown’s Corporate Services studio recently completed a project for Fresenius, a global healthcare service company facing rapid growth and expansion in North America.
“Fresenius first came to us because they had lease renewals coming up,” said Ms. Martin. “Our work originally started as high level programming and planning to figure out if they needed to take more space in surrounding buildings.”
Instead of taking on new real estate assets, Fresenius looked to Dyer Brown to align departments and use existing spaces more effinciently.
Multiple pieces of the project are now underway at Fresenius’ Waltham-based North America headquarters; two of its newly completed offices reimagine Fresenius’ employee experience by boosting creativity and reshaping collaborative processes.
The two spaces include:
>An “IT Clinic.” A 2,000 square foot walk-up service desk for employees needing assistance from the IT department. Fresenius’ IT department was operating inefficiently over many square feet. Dyer Brown designed the clinic in the mold of the Apple Genius Bar or Verizon Wireless stores. Instead of sending an IT team member out to every single person who has a tech issue, employees needing tech support come to the clinic. Reversing the process cuts down on waiting times, while also elevating the visibility of the IT department as a source of employee support.
“They gave us actual images of the Verizon store experiences, and we worked from there to create this walk-up experience,” said Nicole McKinnon, project manager at Dyer Brown. “The clinic is right on the first floor of the office building, and most people walk by it on their way to the café.”
>A 30,000 square foot office floor. “A revamped space bolsters interaction – programming distinct ‘neighborhoods’ for collaboration, organized around a central hub with banquette seating, café tables, and a bar-height counter,” reads the project description. “The gut renovation included solutions for recapturing underutilized space and consolidating fragmented departments.” The neighborhoods include three types of collaborative spaces, known as impromptu, AV, and whiteboard. “The impromptu neighborhoods are set up for spontaneous conversations, while AV areas support meetings needing technology for presentations. The whiteboard settings are ideal for team based problem-solving.”
“Fresenius sees themselves as a one-stop shop experience for people in need of health care services,” said Ms. Ross. “They wanted to spread that type of experience all the way through to every part of their business, including their employees.”
Designers and architects face specific challenges when working with large corporate clients versus working with medium- or small-scale clients.
Even more so than other clients, large corporations present greater change management challenges. It’s critical to team up with the client’s marketing, HR, real estate, and facility management teams to help put together a successful change management strategy for all employees.
A longer chain of hierarchy can complicate that process. Confidentiality at a higher level can result in designers being asked to do things that from their perspective don’t fit into the bigger picture. In that scenario, the design team must help those clients define their best options with the information they were provided.
Naturally, budgets and scheduling are also more complex.
“Especially with changing directions, you have to have a talented group of individuals with experience in keeping things on track. It’s not something you can just generate from a machine.”
The solutions involved in renovating existing offices and creating additional spaces for an expanding workforce can be complicated. Consolidating fragmented departments and recapturing underutilized space often means reducing workstation sizes, reassigning staff to smaller, more efficient offices, and repurposing reclaimed square footage as collaboration and amenity spaces, and these are big changes for any size organization. At its core, design firms must direct focus to something more simple and genuine.
“It’s very cliché, but change is constant in real estate,” said Ms. Ross. “Where these people work is an extension of who they are as a company, and we try to guide them in pinpointing what that looks like.”