Workplace Strategy

― Workplace Strategy

Aligning people, process and place

― Workplace Strategy

Catalysts for change

At our heart, we’re problem solvers. We know that workplace is a powerful tool for boosting innovation, increasing employee engagement and in turn, achieving organizational goals. We listen carefully to your needs to craft a winning strategy that aligns people, process, and place.

Your partners in workplace transformation.

To help you optimize your workplace—whether that means increasing efficiency, planning for growth, or improving organizational culture—we take the journey with you. This means we begin by understanding how your business works and assessing where you are now—and where you want to be. We then use a human-centered and data-driven process to help guide informed decisions about your future workplace.

Selected Projects ―

Workplace Strategy

Unilever

Client: Unilever

Size: 300,000 square feet (27,900 square meters)

Completion Date: 2018 Sustainability: LEED Platinum ® , WELL Certified ™ Gold Awards:

A transformational campus renovation that began with an open-ended question.

When Unilever asked us about next steps with their real estate, we used an interactive dashboard to quickly evaluate options for renovating, vacating, and adding to different buildings, and visualize the resulting capacity, demand, and cost of each scenario. The result was a transformational renovation of the primary campus, or “Project Unify.”

The design incorporates mobility, alternate workstyles, informal meeting areas, and amenity spaces that relat to Unilever’s core business of Beauty, Food, and Refreshment.

The project implements Unilever’s Agile Workplace Guildines, in which employees work in unassigned seats within branded “neighborhoods.”

This approach to choice allows Unilever to increase efficiency, break down silos, and attract and retail talent from nearby New York City.

Creative consolidation of four drab 1960s office buildings into an ultra-sustainable, high-tech U.S. workplace.

Unilever

Confidential Accounting Firm Office

Chicago, Illinois

Client: Confidential

Size: 250,000 square feet (23,226 square meters)

Completion Date: Ongoing

Sustainability: LEED Silver ®

― WHAT IT IS

A pilot that paired a new design approach and change management to reinvent the workplace and modes of working.

The client sought a design to support their commitment to mobility, collaboration and innovation while optimizing real estate to reduce costs. We designed work and meeting spaces to support a highly mobile workforce and introduced technology improvements to boost productivity both on and off site.

Clockwise from Top Right: The program was divided into three distinct space categories; social, col¬laborative, and personal. Collectively, the meeting and practice floors allow employees to choose a workspace to best fit their functional needs each day; a double-height mezzanine space provides a ground level Hub for social and collaborative events.

StudioIDS

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Client: Perkins&Will

Size: 9,800 square feet (910 square meters)

Completion Date: 2016

Sustainability: LEED Platinum, Fitwel 2 stars

Awards:

Outcome of Design Award, ASID, 2019

Good Design is Good Business Award, Architectural Record, 2017

GRAND Award, IIDA Northland FAB Awards, 2017

Honor Award, AIA Minnesota Chapter, 2016

When relocating to the IDS Center, we set out to do less—less walls, less fixed furniture, simpler materials, less energy use, no assigned seating—challenging conventional workplace models and offering more opportunity for choice, creativity, and collaboration.

↑ Nearly every vertical surface has multiple functionsaccommodating pin-up, whiteboard, or open storage ← The main conference room opens up into a flexible, multi-purpose space combining reception, pantry and collaboration areas.

― WHAT MAKES IT COOL

After occupying, 91% of employees said the new space promoted thieir brand and vision.

Shure City Center

Illinois

Client: Shure Incorporated

Size: 35,000 square feet (3,252 square meters)

Completion Date: 2018

Workplace meets customer-centric product display at this new downtown presence for a suburban headquarters.

Shure partnered with us to analyze their real estate options in a time of extraordinary product and market growth. Through extensive data gathering, we developed strategies on how Shure could best use space to support their business goals. Opening the City Center office was one such outcome.

Shure

Be The Match Coordinating Center

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Client: Be The Match

Size: 240,000 square feet (22,297 square meters)

Completion Date: 2015

Awards:

Merit Award, AIA Minneapolis, 2017

FAB Award for Design Excellence, IIDA Northland Chapter, 2017

Leading Edge Excellence Award, IFMA Minneapolis / St. Paul Chapter, 2016

Award of Excellence for Office Build-to-Suit, NAIOP Minnesota, 2016

Be The Match tasked us with assessing their needs for a future workplace, locating a new site, creating a workplace strategy and designing the interiors. Their new workplace not only represents a significant change for employees in their day-to-day work practices, but a shift in philosophy for the entire organization.

A flexible workplace that supports the wellbeing of the employees who work to save and improve the lives of others.

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Brand expression throughout the space was integral to telling the stories of the people the organization helps.

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A café in the workplace is available to employees as well as the general public.

― WHAT MAKES IT COOL

Project Mobility, a program that helped employees understand the details of a flexible workplace.

Be The Match Coordinating Center

Land O’ Lakes Headquarters Expansion

Arden Hills, Minnesota

Client: Land O’ Lakes

Size: 165,000 square feet

Completion Date: 2018

Sustainability: LEED Platinum ®

Awards: National Design Award, Society of American Registered Architects, 2018

A headquarters consolidation resulted in a new hard-working space to support recruitment, growth and innovation.

Through a rigorous data collection and visioning process, we developed a new workplace model that would allow Land O’ Lakes to accommodate growth in less space while dramatically increasing the availability of worksettings designed to support a variety of work needs for its employees.

― WHAT MAKES IT COOL

increase in employee engagement .

The new campus introduces a flexible work environment that meet’s Land O’ Lakes’s commitment to agility, quick decision-making and flexibility.

The workplace strategy identified two types of workers— assigned and unassigned— each corresponding to a desk allocation. In addition, there are no dedicated enclosed offices. Instead, all employees work from workstations in neighborhoods with members of their team. Technology was brought into the forefront to enable and support the various work activities.

It contributed to a 27%

Katlin Amsler

Swati Desai

Michelle Osburn

Natalie Smith

Juliè Gauthier Mariana Giraldo

Lisa Pool

Ann-Fleur Praetorias Brad Rogers

Paul Eagle

Kelly McEachern

Jane Greenthal

That’s why clients and communities on nearly every continent partner with us to design healthy, happy places in which to live, learn, work, play, and heal. We’re passionate about human-centered design, and committed to creating a positive impact in people’s lives through sustainability, resilience, well-being, diversity, inclusion, and research. In fact, Fast Company named us one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies in Architecture. Our global team of 2,700 creatives and critical thinkers provides integrated services in architecture, interior design, landscape architecture, and more. Our partners include Danish architects Schmidt Hammer Lassen; retail strategy and design consultancy Portland; sustainable transportation planning consultancy Nelson\Nygaard; and luxury hospitality design firm Pierre-Yves Rochon (PYR).

Since 1935, we’ve believed that design has the power to make the world a better, more beautiful place.