National Office Furniture Unveils New Headquarters

Contract furniture manufacturers do an excellent job of researching and assessing client needs in order to provide the best product solutions. But, understanding the process of renovating or designing a new office is an experience that is difficult to capture in totality without having firsthand knowledge.

National Office Furniture, a unit of Kimball International, Inc., recently announced its new corporate headquarters location. The 50,000 square foot facility, located on the Kimball International campus in Jasper, IN, was designed, renovated and outfitted by the Gensler design firm and National’s internal design team.

The new headquarters mirrors the shift in today’s workplaces to create floor plans geared toward activity-based space planning; more than 140 corporate employees can choose to work in different areas based on the task they are working on. The entire facility is outfitted with National furniture, giving the manufacturer an excellent opportunity to demonstrate product capabilities, functionality and versatility and at the same time learn if some adjustments would improve function.

The progressive work environments, meeting spaces, workstations, conference rooms, and collaboration areas highlight National’s dedication to working efficiently and allowing employees to work how they are most productive. The space is also used as a working showroom to display product capabilities and promote idea generation with guests.

To get a behind-the-scenes view of a furniture manufacturer’s own office renovation, we sat down with National Office Furniture President and General Manger Kevin McCoy, National Director of Marketing Angie Schuch. and Segment and Sustainability Marketing Manager Lisa Schmidt.

Officeinsight (OI): What gave rise to the start of the project?

KM McCoy (KM): We had a renovation of our previous building in our forecast, and we were planning on doing that. Then, Kimball International went through a reorganization, and we spun off the electronics portion of our company to be a separate publically traded company. And through that process, we took a look at all the real estate that the previous Kimball International owned and what we were going to look like after we spun the electronics portion of the company off. We really took the opportunity to get closer to the rest of Kimball International and move back over to the corporate campus. Kimball Electronics, Inc. actually took possession of the building that we were in.

At that point, we changed tact and decided that we’d do a bigger project and renovate the building that we’re in today. It was an existing building, but you would not recognize it.

OI: No, it looks really spectacular.

KM: We made a lot of changes to it. In fact, we ripped about the front third of the building off, raised it to twice the height it had been at, and expanded it into the back of the building as well through a lot of different material choices and a lot of different space choices, and really opened up the building. We brought a lot more natural sunlight into the space. We really took what we had in the past and took a totally different cut on the space we were in. We wanted to reflect all of the changes that are going on and the trends in the workplace, and take advantage of the fact that mobile technology has become ubiquitous. The fact that people can work from anywhere – we wanted to be able to do that in our own building.

OI: Sure.

KM: The workspace where people actually touchdown every day is not their workplace. The entire building for our employees is their workplace. They can go anywhere, they move around a lot more, and it’s facilitated some interesting interactions. There are folks that I would run into maybe on my way in or out of the building in the morning or in the evening that I now bump into every day in the café. It sparks conversations about some things personal, and some things business related that can really change your approach to what you’re working on when you get back to your workspace. It might give you a different angle on something just from a conversation that sparked a thought.

OI: Cool.

KM: We want to make sure people see National as potentially a full facility supplier for them and for their customers. It can put a different spin on what people think about National. When we bring customers through here, their eyes really open up, and you can see them taking pictures, taking notes, and saying, “I didn’t know that was something you could do.”

Angie Schuch (AS): A neat fact is that all of the furniture that we’re utilizing for people in many different roles is produced by us.

OI: Yes, I was going to ask that, because that’s a key. Did it help you see, in terms of product development, where you might have some opportunities to fill in?

AS: It was definitely a great experience for us to see how our customers specify our products and how we could take our products and outfit the entire space. We are showcasing some of our product modification capabilities here in our new headquarters space as well, and also showcasing how customers might think about utilizing our products differently than they have in the past. For instance, we have different types of rooms that our employees can use, from your traditional conference room space to huddle room spaces and single phone rooms. Those phone rooms can be used by people who may need to make a confidential phone call, or by those who are working in the open plan environment and may need a little more focus time or simply need to stand up and work. We also have varying kinds of conference room capabilities for our employees to use, and we’re showcasing our products in different ways in each one of those rooms. We’re showing our new Essay product in a small conference room application as well. It also allows us to see how our customers specify our products in these types of environments as well.

KM: We learned how we can aid our customers in taking advantage of some of those trends in the marketplace. Obviously, we really wanted to make sure that everyone in the space got access to the natural light; we went from almost 40 private offices in our old building down to just a handful here, none of which are on the windows.

Another thing that’s interesting is that this project reemphasized the fact that the design community is so integral to the process of specification of furniture in space design. We just went through the whole process that our customers are going through every day, and as a member of this industry, we feel that we have a pretty good knowledge of how the process works. But, employing Gensler to help us understand the different forces in the workplace and the opportunities we have to solve some of the problems that can happen when you go to a more open environment. It was a great thing for us. I think it’s a challenge that most customers are faced with today. We’re in the industry, and we still needed that support and that help. It was very exciting to have Gensler as a partner in this program to help us look at not only the space, but how our furniture could help adapt that space.

AS: I agree. We engaged Gensler very early on in our process, and we actually conducted a survey for all of our employees in our existing space. From that, we learned some key elements about what our employees liked and didn’t like about their current space and what was important to them. We worked with Gensler on incorporating those elements into our new headquarters space. When we were doing our furniture layouts, we incorporated the survey feedback to ensure that our space worked very nicely.

OI: Yes, I think it’s interesting. The way those of us who are in marketing and sales and in leadership positions identify with the industry – we’re aware of industry trends and stuff, but a lot of the people that work for us are just working. They could be in any industry, and they have a lot of the same problems that everybody has.

KM: Absolutely.

Lisa Schmidt (LS): The change management aspects that Gensler helped us embrace helped us go above and beyond that in terms of getting buy-in from the employees in the very beginning from that initial survey on what they would like to see perhaps changed in their workspace.

AS: Change management was a key element in the project itself. As Lisa mentioned, we enlisted the help of a change leader for every respective area within our company. As a core team, we met with them on a consistent basis, and they were really the voice of their respective work groups. We wanted people to feel very comfortable in regards to discussing any concerns that they had on the upcoming change. We asked the change leaders to be the eyes and ears of the majority of our employees and to bring any concerns that they had to us as core team members, so that we were very engaged in how our employees were feeling.

We toured the space with them as it was undergoing construction. We allowed them to do a selection within a few SKUs of chairs. They were given the opportunity along with an ergonomist to see what chair would best fit their needs, what type of upholstery would they like to select from. We even showed them a mockup of their future workstation, and the storage they would have in the future.

KM: We took a hard look at our move, and how to set ourselves up to best use our new space. We started at the old building with purge events where we actually cleaned out our drawers and got rid of things that we didn’t need anymore, and ended we recycled 4.4 tons of material.

We switched our customer service monitors at the old space because we planned on bringing them to a new monitor in the new space and wanted them to get used to it in the old space. We also did that with about two-thirds of our folks who were going to voiceover IP as well; we made that transition before we moved, so when they hit the ground here, they could do it running and adapt to their new space and get used to it more easily. We also gave a sit-to-stand option to anyone who was tied to their CPU or phones all day, for example our designers, our graphic designers, our customer service folks, our order entry people.

OI: Oh, that’s cool.

KM: Those people that don’t have quite the same flexibility in where they can choose to work throughout the day – we tried to give them that option so that they could also enjoy the health benefits of getting up, moving around and not sitting all day.

OI: Did they go from cubicles to more open plan in the current thinking?

AS: We went from around 40 private offices to 13. Our managers went from a fixed-wall private office application to more of an open plan managerial station. We wanted our managers to get closer to their employees, and we wanted them to be more engaged in the day-to-day business. We created a little bit of additional privacy for our managers, but they’re in the open plan environment. Managers sit in close proximity to their employees, and they sit very adjacent to other managers so that they can interact and collaborate with one another.

KM: It’s speeded up the flow of work around our environment as well. Things that might have taken a routing in the past are getting done on the fly because people can get up, pop over to a few workspaces and collect the data they need and are then able to move on quickly.

AS: We don’t want people to think they have to stay in their work area. This space was all about getting up out of your particular office and being able to use any space. We have a terrace outside, and we’re finding that people are working outside during the day. We have a hospitality area where people will have impromptu meetings. Obviously the adjustable height workstations allowing people to stand up more, especially when you’re tethered to your office more and you need to use your PC, we wanted people to have the capability of being able to stand up and work. We also have a couple of wellness rooms that our employees can go to if they’re feeling ill, which is a new type of space for us. We want to promote a healthy lifestyle throughout the entire company, And I think a nice confirmation of that effort is that for two consecutive years now National has been named a fit-friendly worksite at the platinum level by the American Heart Association.

OI: That’s great. Essentially, you’re doing all the stuff that we, as an industry and the design community, are talking about in terms of increasing productivity, innovation and employee engagement and buy-in. Since you’ve started an experiment on yourselves, do you have a feedback mechanism in place so that you can see how that’s working as time goes by? Because we all know that when people first move in, there’s the shock of change. Then the question is, “Is this stuff really working? And, what adjustments do we need to make?”

KM: We have a follow-up survey planned once we’re settled into the space for a little bit longer, to ask our employees what they think. I’ve said to them on several occasions that there are going to be things in this building that will have to change. If there’s an area where the noise level may be higher than we like, we may have to address that. There are some areas where we’re going to address some of the things we’ve already noticed. The way we planned stations around privacy – they worked, but not as well as we would have liked, so we actually adjusted our tact and we’re going to make sure we listen to our folks in regard to that.

OI: Is there a specific example of a change you made due to feedback?

AS: One of the changes that came about from the feedback was some of the privacy screens we had. Some of our employees were right outside one of the main thoroughfares where people were walking into the building and right outside a conference room, and it was very distracting because there was not a lot of walkway space in between the two. We increased their privacy screen height a little bit to accommodate that, to help not only with the distraction of the employee in their particular space but also the employees that are in the meeting rooms. All of our meeting rooms are glass; you can stand from any area of our building and simply look all the way through the space.

Also, a lot of our employees said the way that we had seen them working in regards to either the corner or their main workstation wasn’t necessarily comfortable for them from either an ergonomic perspective or just where they were positioned in regards to the building and being adjacent to the next employee. So, we allowed our employees to decide if they wanted to work out of the corner of their workstation or if they wanted to work on their main worksurface. It seems pretty simple, but when you’re installing a lot of monitor arms in various locations throughout the building, it obviously took a lot of planning.

OI: Another thing that occurs to me is that it’s a great incubator for you to think about product development. You have a perfect lab right in front of you.

AS: Absolutely.

KM: We have an area in the building that we brought our industrial designers and our marketing team together, and where they’re housed is sort of the creative heartbeat of the building. It’s a great way to bring the excitement that the new product process brings to our organization, and to spread the creativity that the folks on those teams have around the entire organization. It’s dead center as you walk in our building, and right in the middle of everything that we do. It has been a great incubator for exactly what you said, giving us that opportunity to look at our products differently, to get more points of view and to get feedback across a pretty wide spectrum of team members.

AS: Our customers will also say, “If you could enhance the product to do this, or an application for a different type of a lounge piece…” We’re getting additional feedback on our products, so it’s been a great experience in regard to showcasing those products and getting feedback from our customers.

OI: Do you have a heightened sense of what your customers go through, and what their thought processes are, when they’re contemplating a move such as this?

KM: Absolutely. One of the key things we learned as an office furniture manufacturer is that the office furniture is one piece of what they’re going through. That was not something we didn’t know, but I think we learned about it to a heighted degree.

One of the key things we learned as an office furniture manufacturer is that the office furniture is one piece of what they’re going through. That was not something we didn’t know, but I think we learned about it to a heightened degree.

 

OI: Brought it to the front of mind.

KM: All of us would like to do more than we can do at the end of the day, and there are choices along the way, from the finishes and fabrics to the furniture, to the kitchen, to the glass; across the entire spectrum of the entire space, you need to make choices along the way that either enable or inhibit the next choice. And I think that’s an interesting part of the process that we were able to see firsthand and experience firsthand. We got a sense, to your point, of what our customers, our dealers and the design community go through on each and every project and how we can fit into that and be a valued partner in that process.

AS: We’re very excited about our employees’ reaction to the space and how they’ve embraced the workspace. Our employees feel like this is their space; the entire workplace is their space. They’re free to utilize many areas, and we encourage them to do so. In general, our employees seem happy; happy to see one another, and happy to come to work and interact and bump into each other in the morning, so it’s a good feeling.