“They’ll want to know about our environmental stewardship, they’ll want to know about our workplace, about the flexible work arrangements,” said Stuart Solomon, managing director of Accenture’s Washington area office. “Those are questions now that Gen-Y asks that we didn’t get a whole lot of out of previous generations.”
And so the firm set out to remake its local office space to be more conducive to the way these 20-something workers want to do their jobs.
“We wanted to make sure we were embracing the things that were important to them so that they’d be happy, that they’d be productive,” Solomon said.
Much of the design for its 90,000-square-foot office on North Glebe Road in Arlington is built around a few key concepts: Flexibility, mobility and connectivity. The space makes use of a set-up known as “hoteling,” in which staffers aren’t assigned a designated work space. They reserve one only on days when they plan to come to the office.
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When employees arrive, they can stash their belongings in a brightly colored locker, each of which is outfitted with two electrical outlets for charging their gadgets. Instead of making their way to L-shaped cubicles with high walls, they can settle in at work stations set up in long, parallel rows with no partitions between workers. The layout is meant to encourage collaboration and give the office a more airy feel.
There are still some offices scattered throughout the building, but these spaces are intentionally smaller than your typical office.
“It’s not geared [for someone] to be in there eight hours. It’s geared to make that private call,” said Terence O’Connor, workplace lead for Accenture’s Washington area office.
It’s not just the spatial configuration that makes these work spaces distinctive: None of them come with traditional desktop phones, because Accenture employees are set up to do all of their phone communication over the Web.
If you were to walk through the rows of work stations, you might notice a low murmur that sounds like the whirring of a fan or air conditioner. But the hum is actually a white noise system, designed to muffle sound since it travels so easily through the open floor plan.
Date: September 2, 2013