Creative Office Environments: The Future of Work

Corporate Spotlight
Written by Liz Jones
Monday, 01 October 2007
Bob Delille explains how this company is redefining itself to provide customers with complete solutions. Three years ago, Creative Office Environments decided it needed to take business in a new direction. The company hired a PR firm to unearth its clients’ present perceptions and determine what its brand needed to be in the future. “It was a sobering experience,” said Bob Delille, CEO. “Our customers thought we were great providers of products and services, but as far as I’m concerned, being a great provider of products and services is a sure way to get commoditized right out of business.” Delille would have preferred Creative Office Environments’ clients to say they relied on the company for creative problem solving to meet their office furnishing needs. “At that point, we decided to build our business around creativity and innovation—intellectual capital is the only sustainable, long-term competitive advantage.” Bob Delille, CEO When Creative Office Environments got its start in 1995, the goal was to become the largest full-service office furniture dealership in the country by not only selling office furnishings, but also helping customers plan and manage their work space. The company achieved its goal, but by the late 1990s, it realized that its products and services were becoming commoditized and started branching out into other areas, including floor coverings, raised floors, and floor-to-ceiling partitions. “We wanted to be a single source solution for our clients,” said Delille. In 2004, the company created an audio/visual division, offering smartboards, video conferencing technology, and projectors to drive collaboration and communication across organizations. “We realized that technology is having more of a profound impact on the work environment than office furniture and floor coverings, so we needed to change our business focus again,” Delille said. “We began exploring the integration of technology and other elements of the work environment to change the way people work in the future.” Creative Office Environments has plans to go far beyond its audio/visual division. In fact, it is in the process of becoming a Cisco reseller as the technology giant invests more heavily into global communication devices. “Cisco is not just about hubs, routers, and switches anymore. It is coming out with telepresence devices to drive video conferencing around the world,” Delille said, adding that Cisco recently purchased WebEx, a Web meeting software company. Three horizons Although Creative Office Environments is changing its focus from providing products and services to knowledge-based solutions, it will not abandon its roots. According to Delille, the company follows the principles laid out in The Alchemy of Growth by Mehrdad Baghai, Stephen Coley, and David White (Perseus Books Group, 2000). Baghai, Coley, and White suggest that companies break their businesses down into three horizons: (1) mature business ventures that are reliable sources of income, (2) projects that are in the works but have not yet begun generating revenue, and (3) ventures that are still on the drawing board. Although separate, these three horizons play an integral part in any company’s success. For Creative Office Environments, the first horizon is office furnishings and floor coverings, while the second is the audio/visual division, workspace consulting services, and floor-to-ceiling wall business. The third horizon is the technology integration platform and partnership with Cisco. “We will always sell office furniture. As far as I can see, people are always going to need a place to sit and a work surface, but the kinds of furniture clients will require and how it is configured will change dramatically.” Creative Office Environments’ Charlottesville, Va. office is a prime example of the future of work environments. Three months ago, the company gave all of its employees a laptop and installed a VoIP network so they could work from home. It then transitioned its office from 2,400 square feet to 1,000 square feet, which is used primarily for team meetings. “It looks more like a living room than an office, and we have no assigned work spaces,” said Delille, adding that the company will be monitoring sales throughout the experiment to gauge whether employees are more productive at home or in the office. Supporting innovation Delille pointed out that for the company to successfully change its business model, its culture will need to adapt quickly. “As a provider of products and services, we have had a command-and-control culture. Our new vision has to have innovation and collaboration at the heart of it.” To support the evolving culture, the company built a new headquarters in Richmond, the biggest of its three offices. “Our lease was up, so we took that opportunity to design and build our own space that would help us achieve our vision.” Since Creative Office Environments receives products from manufacturers, it decided to design a combined office/warehouse space. Of the 88,000-square-foot building, the company walled off 19,000 square feet and built a 6,600-square-foot mezzanine (for a total of 25,600 square feet of office space). The building has 36' ceilings, very few partitions, and no private offices. In addition, a 12" raised floor containing air conditioning/heating duct work and plug-and-play data and power allows the company to move project teams often and easily. The company set aside 1,000 square feet for “innovation space,” an area where employees can test concepts, such as going paperless. “We’ll put a group in there for, say 90 days, and during that time, they can’t touch a piece of paper. It’s like a lab where we can learn and later pass our knowledge to our customers,” Delille said, adding that another area has been transformed into a mini showroom, and the company is in the process of designing a virtual showroom to help customers envision how technology and office furnishings can result in greater productivity. With the new business model well underway, if the company conducted another branding survey to follow up on the one it did three years ago, Delille suspects customers would sing a different tune. “The responses would depend on who you asked,” he said. For instance, some of the company’s well-established clients may not be as eager to jump on new work trends. “But we’ve had some success with mid-sized companies, and I think they’d say we help them figure out how to integrate technology and space in a way they couldn’t find anywhere else.”

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