By Chip Cutter and Rachel Feintzeig
When American Airlines Group Inc. polled its corporate staff on what they wanted in new office space, workers responded with a priority familiar to anyone who has flown recently: more legroom.
Design firm Herman Miller Inc. created special desks that allow for more room to spread out at American’s new Fort Worth, Texas, headquarters, which employees fully moved into last month.
There are no private offices, but more than 1,000 meeting spaces, said Jonathan Pierce, American’s director of culture and change. A lap pool and cricket pitch are planned, and outdoor meeting areas are wired so PowerPoint presentations can be beamed on large weatherproof monitors. Piped-in white noise helps tamp down auditory distractions inside the open office.
“It’s like wearing a pair of Bose headphones,” he said.
The U.S. job market has been on a hot streak and keeping workers happy at the office is one of the most important facets of retaining talent, recruiters and management experts say. More companies are taking employee complaints seriously, often spending millions on gleaming offices that incorporate their ideas, and no detail seems too small in some employers’ quest to please.
When McDonald’s Corp. opened its new Chicago headquarters last year, it rolled out a workplace app with a temperature feature so employees could designate by mobile phone if they were too hot or too cold. The feature shows workers their floor plan and location in it, along with three prompts: “warm my space,” “cool my space” or “I’m comfy.”
Based on someone’s selection, the app will trigger what are initially slight temperature modifications in the heating and air-conditioning system. People adopted the app en masse, said Sheri Malec, senior director of workplace solutions at McDonald’s.
“When people are uncomfortable, they’re not as productive,” she said.
Before Expedia Group Inc. opened the first phases of its $900 million Seattle campus on the banks of Elliott Bay last month, the travel company built a small office in the city to test lighting design, furniture choices and an open office plan. The research informed the new headquarters, which embraces an increasingly popular design approach known as biophilia, which aims to bring workers in closer contact to the outdoors, said Mark Nagle, the company’s vice president of global real estate.
Large sliding-glass doors open to the outside when the weather cooperates, turning an indoor corridor in the new building into a breezy seating area. Public hike-and-bike trails line the perimeter of the 40-acre campus, where the company will have as many as 20 Wi-Fi access points hidden in fiberglass rocks so employees can work on a large lawn or near one of the company’s fire pits.
Expedia’s research uncovered that office workers overwhelmingly wanted more natural light and views. The company incorporated a grass-roofed conference space called the prow that resembles a ship and includes a wall of windows directly overlooking the water.
“These are simple human needs that we haven’t been great at in the workplace,” Mr. Nagle said.
Nature is in, but assigned seating is out. Archana Singh, Expedia’s chief people officer, said employees had dedicated desks at the old office. In the new space, workers are assigned what are known as neighborhoods and generally take a seat wherever one is available. They can store their belongings in nearby lockers.
Open offices are a popular choice for many companies because they pack in more people per square foot. Ms. Singh said Expedia communicated about the new communal arrangement for months in advance of the move to get employees prepared; if someone insists on having the same desk each day, they can talk to their manager or colleagues and will get it, she said.
Beyond the glimmering steel and fancy amenities, real-estate development can be surprisingly fraught. Fancier amenities don’t distract from the fact that many workers’ dedicated personal spaces continue to shrink inside open offices. Issues as diverse as tax breaks and increased traffic for local residents spark controversy. Amazon. com Inc.’s new buildings in Seattle, which opened last year, renewed debate about what a corporation’s social responsibility should be with regard to gentrification, housing prices and homelessness in its community.
Design decisions also are often loaded with subtext and nods to power. For example, how many square feet companies devote to a certain division can signal where they think the market is going.
