Tired of staring at the walls of your cubicle at work? Are you stuck in a beige office with no windows? Those days are over for more and more companies. They're following a new trend of designing fun, even zany, work spaces.
Beer on tap. No, you're not in a bar. You're at SnagAJob headquarters, in a space they call Town Center.
SnagAJob's Chief People Officer Greg Moyer gave us a tour, explaining, "We know it's a natural thing for folks to have a drink while they're socializing. So we thought if we put beer on tap, we would be able to extend our work day a bit and have people at the end of the day relax a bit."
Workers can have lunch or hold meetings on a riser, called Snagger Hill. "It was based on research into how people in urban environments go out to lunch and socialize at lunch. They typically go to museum steps," said Moyer.
One of the most unique things you'll ever see in an office is a slide where employees can go from upstairs to downstairs in seconds.
There's a full gym plus showers and lockers, bikes to ride around campus, and forget about board rooms. Instead, there are 42 smaller conference rooms, some with cloud wallpaper, so workers can literally put their heads in the clouds.
Baskervill's Susan Orange, who helped design SnagAJob's office and an office for Creative Office Environments, says more companies, are looking for open spaces that encourage collaboration. Cubicle walls, she says, are getting shorter.
"They need to attract and retain specialized and talented staff. They have to have a different environment to do that," Orange explained.
Companies are creating a new approachability. "Everyone including the CEO is sitting out with everyone else on the floor," Moyer showed us a desk in the middle of a room of desks. "This is the work station for Shawn Boyer, our CEO."
We found fun in other offices, too. Elephant Auto Insurance, for example, has ping pong tables and employees can sit on exercise balls. Last year, the Martin Agency opened up rooms and painted them white, to enable creativity and working together. That's the same idea at SnagAJob.
Said Moyer, "Collectively, we do much better at solving problems and coming up with innovative ways to address the market and help our clients succeed."
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