Associations are knocking down walls

The National Retail Federation is moving to a new headquarters early next year, and doesn't want its new home to look like the old one.

"We are very office intensive," NRF COO Carleen Kohut said about the layout of the association's current headquarters on 7th Street Northwest. NRF has occupied the Washington, D.C., space for at least 20 years, and as staff grew and diversified, the available offices were subdivided into smaller portions.

Kohut

Fitzgerald

Dow

Patton

With the move came the opportunity to build an office environment reflecting a more modern aesthetic. "When the time came to decide where we wanted to go and what we wanted to do, it was open space," Kohut said.

NRF isn't alone. When associations get the chance, they are transforming their work environments by shifting away from a reliance on closed offices and tall cubicles to more open, and sometimes smaller, facilities that can serve a variety of functions.

NRF's new headquarters at 1101 New York Ave. NW, are typical of the new mindset: Instead of closed offices, a majority of the space will be occupied by workstations with low partitions that get plenty of natural light from windows along three exterior walls. When staffers need privacy, they can use one of five small "quiet rooms" to conduct business. And there will be a café-style kitchen designed to make the work experience a little more palatable.

"I think if it is done right, if it is done properly, it can increase [staff] collaboration," said Manny Fitzgerald, executive vice president with the real estate services firm CBRE, about the shift to more open space.

Opening up to possibilities

CBRE has been tracking the trend for several years. In its most recent Nonprofit Practice Group report, the company found the average space per employee for organizations with at least 20 staff has shrunk from 403 square feet in 2009 to 345 square feet in 2013.

That shrinkage has coincided with a decrease in office-intensive layouts. In fact, 22 percent of organizations reported having open layouts in 2013, up from 17 percent in 2010. The numbers signal that more groups are trying to do more with the space available, and an open layout allows for that flexibility.

"I think it is sad to say the association community has lagged a little behind the private sector in this new way of laying out their offices, and it is kind of catching up," Fitzgerald said.

Take the U.S. Travel Association. It recently renovated its roughly 22,000-square-foot headquarters at 1100 New York Ave. NW. In the same space since the mid-1990s, the layout was very traditional for D.C. offices. That needed to change, said CEO Roger Dow.

"We wanted to portray several things to our members and our staff: That this is a dynamic place to work, it is an association on the move and it is meaningful and has a role in Washington, D.C.," he said.

U.S. Travel's senior executive offices had formerly been grouped against the windows, with the workstations clustered more towards the center of the available space. With the new layout, the pattern has reversed, with the senior offices in the middle and the workstations near the windows. Many of the closed offices now sport glass fronts, allowing natural light to diffuse throughout the entire space.

The design has opened more space for three conference rooms that together can host 200 people, up from about 65 before renovation. The association has also been able to incorporate five team rooms, three informal "huddle areas" and one room especially designed for event planners.

All the changes were made with input from staff and the group's executive board. Before the renovations, a staff committee toured other offices around the city where many new design elements had already been incorporated.

In addition, the association arranged to have three prototype workstations built in their offices, with staff voting on the one they liked best.

Board members were kept in the loop and had the chance to review plans before they were implemented.

"We wanted people to understand we were not spending their money unwisely," Dow said.

A need for change

What is driving the push for open space? One factor is the market allowing change, with landlords handing out perks such as rental abatements to lure tenants to their buildings, according to Ken Patton, managing director of tenant representation at real estate services firm Jones Lang LaSalle.

"I think that as people sit down and look at the numbers, they are realizing they can enact change more so than ever before," he said.

Then there is a reexamination of just what constitutes a productive workspace. Steve Spartin, vice president of Jones Lang LaSalle, recounted how a client once half-jokingly told him that half his staff worked at Starbucks.

"We kind of laughed but we also took a step back and thought, ‘What does this mean about how they utilize space?'" he said.

In that case, staffers were more comfortable working in a noisy, non-office setting, he said. So a solution for an association facing a similar situation could be to provide a coffee bar or lounge-style lunchroom.

More organizations are looking for flexibility with the space they have—that is, being able get multiple uses from a room or an area, said Heather Nevin, with OTJ Architects in Washington, D.C.

One of her company's clients was the National Restaurant Association, which wanted a large-scale kitchen in its new offices to showcase the industry.

OTJ designed the kitchen to double as a day-to-day food pantry for staff as well as a reception area for visitors and staff events.

"We did not want that to be a single-use space," Nevin said.

If there is one drawback to moving to an open-space layout, then it is the accompanying loss of privacy. That's why small, enclosed meeting rooms are important, according to Nevin.

If everything is going to be open, "let's also provide a couple of spaces where, if you need to have a conversation, you can shut the door and no one can see you," she said.