Colorado Real Estate Journal - March 16, 2016
CBRE is moving its downtown offices to the top two floors of Seventeenth Street Plaza, which will be a showcase for its global Workplace360 initiative. Currently scattered in several spaces in the building at 1225 17th St., the company will occupy the entire 32nd floor and a portion of the 31st floor for a total of 38,975 square feet. An internal staircase will connect the floors. The new office is designed to promote flexibility, mobility and productivity through technology-enabled, free-address and paperless offices. It will open in April. “While we are not moving far in terms of distance, our new office will be a world away from a traditional office environment,” said Pete Schippits, CBRE Colorado senior managing director. “Through leading-edge technology, strategic use of space and enhanced mobility, CBRE is creating an office that will enable us to serve our clients better than ever before.” The space will be free-address, meaning there will be no assigned desks and a large percentage of the overall footprint will be dedicated to collaborative workspaces and meeting rooms. Employees will be able to choose where they work throughout the day, with more than 10 options that range from a desk, bench seating, a private huddle room or the social café area. CBRE’s world headquarters in Los Angeles as well as offices including Chicago and Mexico City already have gone that route, and Schippits said more than 90 percent of the employees in those offices have stated they wouldn’t go back to their previous work environments. The design is based on how CBRE employees work and is not a formula to be replicated by its clients. Rather, what CBRE’s in-house Workplace Strategy group does is study how an individual company operates and its employees needs, and creates a workplace strategy around that. A strategy for a law firm, for instance, would look quite different. “Our Workplace Strategy team includes some of the brightest minds in the country when it comes to understanding how a work environment impacts culture, productivity and talent retention,” Schippits said. “In our Denver office, we are practicing what we preach and creating space that embraces the new way people work today, including a strong emphasis on employee choice and flexibility. “We were our own client, if you will,” said Schippits, explaining Workplace Strategies found no group of CBRE employees in their seats more than half of the time. The result can be like an empty parking lot: unused, lifeless space. “What we’re looking for in a workplace is an activated sense of community,” he said. Money the company saves on doing away with assigned desks will be put toward amenities. The “heart” of the offices will be a hotel lobby-type space with soft seating and a café where employees can meet with clients, work on their computers or take a break without having to walk down the street to a coffee shop. “We really think we’re going to find people in the office more now,” said Schippits. There will be shared neighborhoods where complementary teams, such as occupier services and project management, are grouped together. Each neighborhood will have its own desk areas, huddle rooms, etc. Collaborative areas will replace corner offices and will account for 80 percent of the west-facing space. “We want some of the most attractive areas of the space to be used by the most number of people,” Schippits said. Employees are providing input for functionality of the new office. Not everyone has embraced the coming change, but Schippits said buy-in at other CBRE offices has been “virtually immediate.” “They actually have this attachment to the workspace,” he said, noting employees are apt to show their space off not only to clients, but also to friends and family. Gensler, which designed more than two dozen Workplace360 offices for CBRE around the world in partnership with the CBRE Workplace Strategy group, is designing the Denver space. “We’ve designed it to very much reflect a Colorado/Denver look and feel,” Schippits said. The new office is slated to open in April. The company’s Greenwood Village offices also will be redesigned when its lease there expires a couple of years from now. CBRE signed a lease for the downtown space in January. Doug Bakke, Sam DePizzol, Greg Holm, Hannah Jacobus and Ira Wellen, all of CBRE’s Occupier Advisory & Transaction Services unit, represented the company in the transaction.