Add sit-stand desks. Subtract cubicles. Multiply the number of seating options. And don’t forget to carry the one … or many signs to the new building.
Sum it all together, and the result is EY’s new Atlanta office.
The accounting giant recently debuted its new 102,000-square-foot office at Ten Twenty Spring in Midtown, occupying three floors in one of the city’s newest workplace towers. It also aims to set a new bar for office design, incorporating all the trappings of a post-pandemic workplace to try to make the commute worth it for workers.
Joe Pearson, EY’s Southeast facilities manager, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on a recent tour that he knows “people usually push back” when told to return to a physical office. But he said he hopes the new Atlanta workplace is an exception, a retention tactic also designed to win the war for talent.
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
“There’s no telling this team that this is where you have to sit,” he said, highlighting the office’s focus on unassigned seating. “As soon as you do that, the space becomes exclusive.”
Every desk is sit-stand, and there’s a mixture of two-screen setups and curved-screen monitors, depending on an employee’s preference. The three-story office features two quiet spaces mimicking the hushed atmosphere of a library, including piped-in white noise. Other settings embody the ambiance of a coffee shop or movie theaters enrobed in velvet curtains.
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
Soon, the entire office will smell like cucumber mint, a market-tested and custom fragrance that Pearson said is intended to complete the workplace experience.
Regenia Sanders, EY Atlanta office managing partner, said the company maintains a hybrid workplace model, asking employees to commute two or three days a week. She said the amenities surrounding the office are just as important as those inside.
“We are constantly reevaluating our real estate strategy,” she said. “So we really want to make sure that we are in the urban centers of commerce wherever we are.”
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
In Atlanta, that means leaving downtown for Midtown — although the new office has a wing named “Downtown” alongside other neighborhood names.
EY relocated from its prior home at 55 Allen Plaza in downtown, removing its rooftop logo in late June. Sanders said there was “only one week that we didn’t have signage in the city” before new logos were affixed to Ten Twenty Spring’s exterior, which overlooks the Downtown Connector.
Ten Twenty Spring, which was developed by Portman Holdings, was one of the last office towers to start construction after the 2020 pandemic. It resulted in an office building disguised as a hotel, and that design and level of amenities are part of why EY leaders said they selected it as their new home for the roughly 2,800 Atlanta-area employees.
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
It’s also a place EY said is designed for long-term growth, even as artificial intelligence threatens to alter white-collar work, and consulting in particular. Sanders said the firm has invested $1.4 billion into training employees for AI and other technologies, adding that the Atlanta office investment only makes sense if the company plans to grow headcount.
“(AI) is a really big growth area for us, and we don’t see that at all impacting any notion of contracting. It’s definitely a growth strategy for us,” she said. “Contracting was not part of our game plan at all when we selected this space and how we’ve designed the layout.”
This story has been adapted from the September edition of The Water Cooler, the AJC’s LinkedIn newsletter about the office market and the workplace.
If you like it and the business team’s other LinkedIn newsletters, we’ve got great news for you: The AJC launched a weekly business newsletter called Georgianomics. You can sign up now to get it sent to your inbox every week.
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