mds moves: Changing Where and How We Work
DESIGN INSIGHTS
By Meaghan Kennedy, IIDA, NCIDQ, Senior Interior Designer
For years workplace trends have come and gone. Some trends never come to reality, as they were far removed from the needs or desires of the workforce. Everyone’s reality was shaken in 2020 when the pandemic forced many organizations to think differently about how work is performed. Where one works has changed for many office-based workers. Employees are no longer tied to their workstations for 40 hours a week.
As a designer, it has been fascinating to see clients who pre-March 2020 would tell us they could never work without their coworkers sitting around them in a workstation neighborhood. Yet suddenly, these same clients pivoted to working from home in essentially a private office, and report that they are working efficiently and happily. The pandemic has been a change accelerant to many factors in our lives. At MDS, much like our clients, we saw it disrupt our work and put into focus what is important for our employees, our clients, and our work.
MDS Architects’ Workplace, 99 Chauncy Street, Boston
Pre-Pandemic
Prior to the disrupter we call COVID-19, MDS started its journey towards a new workplace. Our current home at 99 Chauncy Street was quickly becoming out of touch with how we work, as it was designed when paper drawing sets were features of everyone’s desk. The 47-seat office was rarely full, with many employees at meetings outside the office, at job sites, or working from home for part of their day to allow for childcare or doctor’s appointments. We also had the pressure of our current lease expiring in Fall 2021. With factors such as building management changes and rising rental prices, MDS decided it was time to explore alternative options.
In Summer 2019 we engaged our real estate team, Newmark Knight Frank, to do a market analysis of what was available in Downtown Boston. We quickly realized that market rates in Downtown Boston were increasing, and we would have to either increase our budget, move to a less costly area, or downsize to a smaller office. With a desire to stay in our current location and not increase our budget, downsizing was the logical option. Could we reduce our footprint by 2,500 sf (20%) and enhance the collaborative environment that makes our project teams succeed?
Downsizing is something many of our clients are also grappling with. The decision to downsize is usually an easy one, as who does not love to save money? However, the “how” can be the struggle. How can you reduce space but still encourage employees to come into the office (especially after 18+ months of working from home in pajamas)? How can you allow for privacy when needed? How can you maintain your culture? How do you promote collaboration, mentorship, and community?
MDS started with a simple question: why do we want people to come into the office? Collaboration and mentorship was the answer.
MDS started with a simple question: why do we want people to come into the office? Collaboration and mentorship was the answer. This made us prioritize spaces for collaboration and focus less on individual workstations in our new workspace.
With MDS’s pre-COVID observation of the office rarely being more than 70% full at any time, moving to a “zero address” system—where no employee would have an assigned desk but instead “check-out” a desk for the day—made sense. Although it would not be an easy change for many employees who had over a decade of items at their personalized workstations. Additionally, the IT infrastructure was not in a place to easily allow for a mobile workforce.
Shifting framework
Change to a workplace is often a dimmer switch rather than a toggle. MDS leaders therefore decided to move forward with an emphasis on collaborative spaces over individual spaces, and soon a 7,500 sf space was within reach. There would be cultural and IT changes that would need to happen to support this, but it was time to find a space and start the process. For many clients finding a new space starts with square footage and location and MDS was no different, but as design professionals an inspiring space was also high on the list.
As the search for the space was happening during the beginning of the pandemic, MDS leaders added to their criteria a building with amenities to further entice their workforce into the office. Over the past 5-10 years Boston’s commercial real estate have upgraded many of their buildings to include gyms, conference space and even baristas— creating those tertiary spaces that many are adding to enhance staff’s work/life balance. Thankfully, the pandemic also upturned the commercial real estate market enough to allow our search into areas of Downtown Boston, previously out of our price range. After touring many potential locations and doing schematic test fits, it became clear MDS had found our new home at 40 Broad Street.
40 Broad Street, Boston
Sculpture in the lobby of 40 Broad Street
The new location at 40 Broad Street checked the criteria for a new location and then had a few extras that made the location stand out. The building had been recently renovated to include sought-after amenities, such as bike storage space and lockers rooms with showers—which for a firm with 25% of our workforce commuting via bike was a perfect fit. The building also boasts a fitness center, conference space, and communal lounge with an inviting fireplace for those cold Boston winter days.
The 40 Broad Street location was ideal—not far from our current location and a bit closer to North Station, which seemed like a nice trade off after being five minutes away from South Station for the past 15 years. As far as an inspiring space, the office featured floor-to-ceiling windows that flood the space with sunlight for most of the day. In addition, the building’s history was appealing for this group of designers who love to see historic spaces reinvented for new uses.
Understanding Workplace culture
Our search for a new space mirrors what we are currently working on with our clients and starting early is key. Businesses looking to make a move can learn from our experience. Looking back, it would have been great to have quantifiable data on occupancy trends to tell us how many individual workstations we needed. Data on meeting room usage would also have been helpful. Although in a world that is embracing hybrid and virtual meetings, that may have only been a starting point.
Understanding your office’s culture is essential. If you are starting off with private offices and resistant to change, then your future workspace can only change so much if you want to maintain the culture that you have. MDS understood that collaboration and mentorship is essential. However, if your culture demands acoustic and physical privacy, then the need for individual workstations may be higher.
Start thinking about your organization’s culture—has COVID changed it for the better or worse? What in-person activities and gatherings from the “before times” do you want to savor and support with your office? What gatherings and tasks work better in the virtual world? These answers will help you think about your future space and what types of spaces are most important.
Finding the location turned out to be the easy part, in our next issue we will share the cultural change and technology updates that supported our downsize.
About Meaghan Kennedy, IIDA, NCIDQ
Meaghan Kennedy is a senior interior designer at MDS Architects where she focuses on workplace and education projects. She is the recipient of the 2021 IIDA New England Star Award, past president of IIDA New England, and chairs IIDA New England’s Design Leaders Network.