KANSAS CITY— For years, commercial real estate professionals have dealt with tenants who want to shrink their offices' footprints through strategies like cutting down the number of separate offices and designing more common space. And now, CBRE's Kansas City office has joined that trend by moving their roughly 50 professionals from the 5th floor of Park Plaza at 4717 Grand, where for ten years they occupied about 13,000-square-feet, to the American Century Tower II at 4520 Main Street, where they now occupy just 10,000-square-feet of space.
“The office sector is clearly going through a transformation,” says Kevin Thorpe, chief economist at Cassidy Turley. “Many businesses are reassessing space needs and recognizing they can function perfectly well with a smaller, more efficient footprint.”
To shrink their footprint, CBRE conducted a workplace strategy study to identify possible efficiencies. The study showed that employees used the more than 50 cubicles and offices at 4717 Grand only 46% of the time. The remaining hours of the work day were spent collaborating in conference rooms, or offsite. With this knowledge in hand, the firm decided to design an open office environment.
“Work is not where we go – it is what we do,” company officials say when describing their new concept. No one has their own desk, cubical or office. Instead, the new space has more than 40 open cubicles, three “focus rooms,” five “huddle rooms,” two large conference rooms and five “offices for a day.” Anyone can work from any of these spaces as well as the open collaboration areas located throughout the office. Occupying less space also allowed the firm to incorporate more state-of-the-art technology such as Crestron reservation systems and MediaScape collaboration spaces.
“By adopting this new workplace culture, not only do we now have a state-of-the-art environment for our professionals, we can provide our clients with a working model of workspace solutions and what we learned from our first-hand experience,” says CBRE Kansas City's managing director Mike Klamm.
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Brian J. Rogal
Brian J. Rogal is a Chicago-based freelance writer with years of experience as an investigative reporter and editor, most notably at The Chicago Reporter, where he concentrated on housing issues. He also has written extensively on alternative energy and the payments card industry for national trade publications.
