CUYAHOGA FALLS: If the folks at Triad Communications want to throw a party for clients, they can just roll their office furniture out of the way.
If they want to work together on a project, they can cluster their desks.
And if they want to talk without disturbing their colleagues, they can slip into a glass-walled meeting room or hunker down in a more private space behind a sliding barn door.
Creating a flexible space that promotes collaboration was the company’s goal in transforming an old welding shop on Front Street into its new offices. The company, which does market and design work, moved in late February to the building high above the Cuyahoga River.
It’s a space without doors on private offices, without permanently anchored workstations and without the stuffiness and constraints of the traditional office setup.
It is an example of the openness and flexibility that typify many new workplaces in the 21st century.
Work spaces today are increasingly designed for teams, not for individuals laboring in solitude. The thinking behind these new collaborative spaces is that innovation requires more than one mind or one set of insights.
Triad moved to the space from a Georgian Colonial house at Fourth Street and Broad Boulevard that the company outgrew. The previous building was segmented into more traditional offices, and company President Rick Krochka said he wanted the new headquarters to be a big, open space that would promote creativity and collegiality among the staff.
The building was constructed in 1928 to house two companies, Lange Portable Electric Welding and Falls Stamping & Welding. Later occupants included Buckeye Metals, Congo Corp. and Industrial Tool & Machine Co. The facility was last used as an automotive storage warehouse.
Rough elements remain from the building’s industrial past, such as brick walls and exposed ducts. They’re juxtaposed against sleek contemporary furnishings and artwork that includes a giant, hanging metal sculpture by Akron artist Don Drumm.
The main floor of the brick building is a wide-open, concrete-floored space occupied by three pods of four desks each, with room for two more pods. The space is flanked by offices and meeting rooms, most of them glass-walled but some more closed off for conversing privately or viewing presentations on a screen.
Clerestory windows let natural light pour into the area, so the need for artificial light is minimized. The windows can also be opened for ventilation.
Accordion doors in the front of the building open wide enough to accommodate a vehicle, so Triad could bring in an ice cream truck for employees on a warm day or antique autos for a client event, Krochka said. All the desks, files and other furniture are on wheels, so they can easily be reconfigured or rolled away for temporary storage.
Downstairs, there’s an employee break room complete with a bar, a Foosball table and a pool table with an optional pingpong top. A small room off to the side will house fitness equipment, and the lounge will open to a patio overlooking the river.
As much as possible of the original building was reused and restored, including most of the windows and much of their original hammered glass. The original glass was reinstalled in the front and side of the building, where they are most visible.
Krochka said the project was about 3½ years in the making and cost $1.3 million, part of which will be offset by state and federal tax credits for historical preservation.
The vision for the space was his, he said, but it was executed by architect David Pelligra of Cuyahoga Falls and general contractor Chris Skoda of Skoda Construction in Highland Heights.
“It’s beyond my expectations,” he said.
If there’s a downside for the employees, Krochka said, it’s that the open work area creates noise and distractions they’re not accustomed to. “It does present some challenges,” he said, but he’s confident they’ll adjust. Some might slip on headphones when they need to block out the interference, he suggested.
Those kinds of distractions have prompted something of a backlash in the business world to open, collaborative spaces, however. Opponents of wide-open workplaces argue that people need some degree of privacy, both for performance reasons and for their emotional and physical health.
Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, argued in an opinion piece in the New York Times that research shows privacy boosts productivity and helps buffer against the peer pressure that can lead to group-think.
She said studies show open-plan offices also make workers hostile, insecure and distracted, as well as more likely to suffer from high blood pressure, stress, influenza and exhaustion.
Recent research by Steelcase Inc. suggested the imbalance between shared and private spaces has reached what it calls crisis proportions. The office-furniture manufacturer conducts research on work space topics and is widely considered a thought leader on the area.
The study, which involved 10,000 people in 14 countries, found people need different levels of privacy for different tasks, and that the need changes during the day. It said the optimum work space provides a diverse choice of spaces, some to support group work and some to provide privacy for focus and rejuvenation.
Robert Lann, who served as lead interior designer on the Triad project for Akron’s Jones Group Interiors, said the need for privacy in an open space is why short partitions were used to divide the desks that are arranged in pods.
Triad also has a conference room that can be closed off from the rest of the space for a private conversation or a personal call.
“At the end of the day, people still want to have some sense of privacy,” Lann said. “They still want a work zone they can call home.”
The open spaces, Lann said, should encourage people to trade ideas and reach resolutions more quickly than they could in Triad’s previous office setup. And the employee gathering space — an increasingly common feature in offices — helps create a more homey feel in an environment where people spend so much of their time, he said.
What Krochka especially likes is the way the space encourages interaction.
“What I love is I can walk in every day and see all my employees,” he said. “They see all their co-workers every day.”
Mary Beth Breckenridge can be reached at 330-996-3756 or mbrecken@thebeaconjournal.com. You can also become a fan on Facebook at www.facebook.com/MBBreckABJ, follow her on Twitter @MBBreckABJ and read her blog at www.ohio.com/blogs/mary-beth.