The Clorox Company didn’t find the Vista 21 building by luck or accident.
The consumer product company of Oakland, California, researched and planned for two years before moving its Bentonville branch and its 92 employees into CrossMar Investment’s new building in September.
“We started talking about what we wanted in the new space,” said Mike Schmandt, the company’s director of Sam’s Club business. “We wanted people to feel good about hanging out here. We ask people to work long hours sometimes. We wanted it to be a comfortable environment.”
It’s a challenge faced by many companies in today’s business world: finding the best office metrics for its workforce. Companies find that common workspaces are more economically efficient, but amenities such as kitchens, fast Wi-Fi connectivity and natural light are equally advantageous.
Companies that build (or move into) new offices can have a big say in the design. When a company moves into a preexisting structure, the challenge is adapting the new space to modern design, infrastructure and technology.
Schmandt said that when Clorox began preparing for the move, executives with the corporate real estate division met with employees for “information gathering” to find out what exactly everyone would like in the new building. CrossMar had begun building the outside shell of the Vista 21 building — at 2200 SE 28th St. — and then altered the interior to match Clorox’s design plan.
The new office fit Clorox’s view of fewer offices and a common work area for most of its employees. That fits the company’s efficiency requirement, while a state-of-the-art kitchen, video installations in numerous conference rooms and huddle rooms and an internet-connected back patio were amenities for the employees.
The 32,589-SF, two-story building was given a thoroughly modern look with bays of windows on the front and rear of the building. Each end of the building is almost entirely glass, a complete 180 from Clorox’s previous home, which was a typical old-school office building.
“That building was much more residential,” said Vice President Mark Malo. “We used to call it a sorority house. We were looking for something that was very open. We wanted the modern feel.”
Modern Cubist
The only hard sell for the employees was the reduction in individual offices. Malo and Schmandt kept their offices — “But they’re much smaller now, just room for a desk and a chair,” Schmandt said — but approximately 30 other employees went from offices to a group workspace.
The end result, though, is a place where employees enjoy their work experience and the company gets economic benefits. The state-of-the-art kitchen not only gives employees a wired place to eat or grab a cup of coffee, but it gives Clorox sales people a working kitchen to promote its products to potential customers.
“We spent a lot of time on the kitchen and patio,” Malo said.
A lot of time was spent making it a great place to work, technologically speaking. Malo said each meeting room and workspace has video capabilities, and the video system is uniform throughout so an employee will know how to operate any video device in the building.
“Believe it or not, that’s a big deal,” Malo said. “You had to have a Ph.D. to figure out each one before.”
Clorox’s thoroughness in designing a new office space is not new in the business world. Sage Partners President Marshall Saviers, who helped broker Clorox’s lease with CrossMar, said Clorox’s new office represents the dominant trend in the business world, and developers are hard at work to fulfill the new requirements.
“They’re looking for lots of natural light and tall ceilings,” said Saviers, whose office is in the similarly designed Hunt Tower in Rogers. “A lot of these companies now are going from a private office environment to an open cube environment. When they do that, they want to have all these amenities in the building.”
Saviers, who turned 37 last week, said his generation may be of the corner-office age, but younger employees want bright, cheerful work environments, walking trails and places to chill during breaks. Companies that want and need to hire these young, talented employees have to adjust accordingly.
“When you look at younger people, they don’t care as much about the corner office, but they do care about amenities,” Saviers said. “A lot of people are going to this live-work-play environment. You spend a lot of time at your office and you want to make sure it’s a fun place to work. People understand it’s important to retaining talent but also keeping them happy.”
Selling Work
It’s a trend in heavy play in Benton County, home to major retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc., whose vendors and suppliers saturate the business landscape.
But even in Fayetteville, where the office market has more local and regional businesses and generally requires less square footage per company, amenities and work environment can be important factors.
For example, the seven-story E.J. Ball Plaza, which overlooks the downtown square, sold for $3.125 million in September, and the new owners plan to renovate it and put restaurants on the ground floor. It has built-in amenities such as a panoramic view of downtown, proximity to the Farmers Market and the downtown shopping and cultural areas.
David Erstine, a vice president at CBRE in Fayetteville, said amenities are a common thread when companies contact him looking for office space, regardless of which county they want to be in.
“Recruitment and retention oftentimes come up in conversations when they’re talking about their space needs,” Erstine said. “‘How is my team going to accept this space? Is this going to be a space I’m going to use as a recruitment tool and a retention tool?’ Office users often ask for location of amenities, location of the Razorback Greenway, access to I-49. Those are key points for people in Benton County, for sure.”
Saviers said finding suitable spaces for the elaborate and large office footprints such as Hunt Tower or Vista 21 isn’t easier or harder; it’s just different. CrossMar originally was constructing Vista 21 as a multi-tenant space before changing to suit Clorox as a single tenant.
“Downtown Fayetteville, you’re going to reuse the architecture that is already there,” Saviers said. “That’s another trend right now, adaptive reuse. If you go to Pinnacle, you’re going to have more of a suburban feel. You can look more modern, although there are a lot of modern buildings going up in downtown Bentonville. They do try to reuse as much as they can. It’s good. It keeps our culture and character.”