Walk the Talk

Until very recently, it was hard to argue—even in the world of cubicles and workstations—that Haworth stood out. Its $1.66 billion in net sales last year wasn’t too shabby, but it paled against the juggernaut that is Steelcase. And the company couldn’t compete with the design legacies of Herman Miller, Vitra, and Knoll. The Holland, Michigan–based giant was the Sears, Roebuck & Co. among the Barneys and Selfridges: reliable, solid, and sensibly priced, but not exactly cutting-edge. No, vision was not a word associated with Haworth, but then again its new headquarters is quite a sight.

Designed by Ralph Johnson and Eva Maddox, of Perkins + Will, and located about a half-hour drive from Grand Rapids—past the commercial and light-industry parks that form the heartland of the $11.42-billion-a-year American office-furniture ­industry—Haworth’s new home is in fact a radical trans­formation of the old one. Gone is the scary concrete ­bunker where workers had holed up since the early 1980s—replaced by an airy three-story sweep of glass and steel that slices across its 320-acre site of grasslands and marshes like a sleek airline ­terminal. A soaring new atrium runs the facade’s entire 1,000-foot length, glistening in polished white terrazzo floors and punctuated by olive trees, splashes of red, and aerial stairways, all spanning panoramic views to the outside. “Our goal was to create a stronger image for Haworth as a design-oriented company,” Johnson says. “Something that was more welcoming to the visitor—a living showroom.”

But Haworth’s new home isn’t just about brand-building slickness, light-filled expanses, Star­­­­­bucks lattes, and a technical-support counter modeled after the Genius Bars of the Apple Stores. And while it is a showcase for sustainable design—a LEED Gold rating is anticipated—that’s not the mission either. Instead, the new building heralds the reinvention of a once staid organization as it transforms from within, all the while unleashing design’s latent potential (and confronting its limits too). It is essentially about how a company becomes its own guinea pig. “It was central that we set a whole new standard, take what we’ve learned in our research, and practice what we preach,” says Dick Haworth, the company’s chairman.

First, some background: originally called Modern Products, Haworth was founded by Dick’s father, G. W., a former high school shop teacher who began making wooden retail display racks in 1948. By 1954 operations had shifted toward modular office partitions, the proto-panel systems that would give us the cubicle. In fairness, you could say the company was founded on innovation (and blame the dreaded cubicle on Herman Miller, which introduced it in 1968): Haworth unveiled the world’s first pre-wired modular panel in 1976, the same year it took its current name.

But unlike its competitors, Haworth, which is still family owned, had no Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson, or Florence Knoll to light up its marquee. Bold design statements were simply not in its DNA. Not long after the company started touting its new corporate recycling center in 1993, Herman Miller opened its William McDonough–designed “GreenHouse,” the state-of-the-art eco-factory and offices just down the road. In the 1980s and ’90s, as Vitra was transforming its campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany, into a playground designed by Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid, Haworth was wrapped up in due diligence, snatching up not flashy architecture but manufacturers from Canada to Italy with names like Castelli, Interface AR, and SMED. The company’s global expansion (it now operates in more than 120 countries) brought everything from raised access floors to movable walls—“and maybe a European design influence,” says Franco Bianchi, Ha-worth’s Italian-born CEO—into its product portfolio. Now it had to decide what to do with it all.

Unveiled last month, the new headquarters, which is adjacent to an existing million-square-foot plant, is a culmination of a companywide makeover that kicked off with the 2004 renovation of its Chicago showroom, also designed by Maddox. “When I first started working with them, I remember seeing their catalog pages up on the wall getting marked up,” recalls Maddox, who oversaw the new building’s space planning. “That was my aha moment: something was changing. There was an opportunity to retell the Haworth story and look at every aspect of their business.”

Indeed, under Dick Haworth and Bianchi, intense soul-searching, brainstorming, and client canvasing had made one thing resolutely clear: the company had to become less of a catalog and more like a clearinghouse of expertise. “Our customers were starting to ask for more than just great products at great value,” Bianchi says. “We had to go one step up, to partner with our customers and use our knowledge and research to help make their work spaces healthier and more productive.”

Meanwhile, some keeping up with the Joneses was in order—with Steelcase, Herman Miller, and the other major players who are based nearby. “Being in western Michigan with our competitors, our customers can shop around,” says Elizabeth Ebihara, a Haworth marketing manager. “And until we did this,” she adds while gesturing around her, “the experience they would have here would pale in ­comparison.”

Dozens of clients from around the world visit Haworth daily, some flown in on the company’s Gulfstream jet. And what they’ll find nowadays is not so much an office as a fully loaded 300,000-square-foot showroom—entered at the head of the daylight-flooded atrium as it shoots into the distance, the perspective-enhancing angle of its glass curtain wall exaggerating its already considerable length.

Visitors are led up and down this central axis, toward a new bookending wing that slopes into the landscape, and past rows of Haworth’s Com­pose, UniGroup, and Patterns ­workstations—each matched to the needs of its departmental users (and all easily reconfigured, of course). They walk by new “refreshment centers”—what used to be called staff lounges—and ogle the sprawling outdoor patio carved from the gloomy below-grade parking lot that had been there before. They’re shown how the entire facility becomes a jigsaw puzzle for a range of work habits and needs: large unassigned tables for mobile staffers, banks of meeting and touchdown rooms encased in glass, laptop-ready seating groups of Hello and Tuxedo lounge chairs, and the atrium’s monumental stair, encouraging employees to hang out. “It was like developing a giant chassis that has a tremendous amount of flexibility and uses Haworth products to their fullest extent,” Maddox says of the building.

And the tour will have only just begun: showcasing far-out new materials from Material ConneXion, a mini-exhibition in the atrium offers inspiration. Elsewhere, a gallery chronicling Haworth’s history drives home a legacy while a mock-up area highlights the advantages of the raised access floors that visitors have been walking on all along. They’ll stroll past the Ideation Group, Haworth’s in-house think tank, toward the Sustainability Lab, Seating Gallery, and Wood Salon. Visitors can powwow with Shanghai or Singapore in the Global Capabilities videoconferencing center, and then work their way through the red graphics-emblazoned kiosks that line the atrium like sentries—mileposts that double as impromptu sales stations, their flat screens offering interactive product demos if the real thing needs elaboration. One starts to get the feeling that a visit to Haworth is like going to an Epcot devoted to the office of the future. “Dick Haworth didn’t want just this big atrium you would look at,” Maddox says, “but instead to have a space that engaged and energized so you understand this company is on the move.”

All of this is backgrounded by the facility’s eco-credentials—a checklist that includes abun­dant daylight, and fine-tuning measures that are expected to yield an energy-­reduction benefit of about 30 percent. Its green roof reclaims rainwater for use in irrigating new drought-resistant landscaping while the company is taking steps to reduce its total environmental impact, from the manufacture and life cycle of its products to employee travel (­including the Gulfstream)—pledging, for example, to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions by 20 percent per dollar of sales by 2009.

What’s more, about 98 percent of the previous structure and its contents was donated, recycled, or reused; in fact, the new building incorporates nearly the entire steel-and-concrete skeleton of its predecessor. You wouldn’t know it though. Looking like a cross between a parking garage and a prison designed in the high urban-renewal style, the earlier concrete pile was so unpresentable that clients never saw more than a fraction of it. Attempts at facelifts were “like putting lipstick on a pig,” says Ebihara, but in the new facility there’s no sweeping under the rug. In its vast openness, the ­building’s 800 employees are constantly ­onstage—and that took some getting used to. “The shift to becoming a showplace for our customers introduced a lot of anxiety,” says Beth Straebel, the head of training and development. Not even the CEO was exempted: “Sometimes I have to remind myself that everyone can see me all the time,” Bianchi says, adding jokingly, “I can’t take naps anymore.”

More than a grandiose sales pitch, the new facility represents a corporate culture reawakened. “We realized we needed to change to a culture of constant experimentation,” says David Fik, a senior strategist in the Ideation Group. “We were risk-averse.” Still, one of the first things you’ll notice about the building is how it reflects the current paradox of the office, a paradigm that accommodates the diversity of work styles just as it shoehorns them into conformity. For instance, “members,” as Haworth calls employees, might have their choice of huddling and gathering spaces—but now that they’re in full view, they can’t hang posters or keep coats at their own desks. A cubicle is still a cubicle, and the Google headquarters this is not. At the same time, one of the oddities of the office-­furniture industry, with its roots in the scientific management theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor, is that for all its celebration of individuality and human factors, its efforts come with the not-so-subtle subtext that a fair chunk of office workers would probably rather be doing something else. Thus, seen one way, Haworth’s atrium is a sunny piazza providing a visual and social focal point that activates the whole. Seen another, it’s a totalitarian fishbowl—a linear panopticon where the knowledge that someone might be watching you intensifies the self-enforced behavior modification that’s more favorably called professionalism. But ­transparency cuts both ways, and another thing a visitor to Haworth might detect is a pervasive sense of company-sanctioned candor. “Just because of the new space, it doesn’t mean the culture has changed,” Fik says. “But the conditions are set for it.”

In the run-up to the new building, coinciding with an effort to shake up an organization that had become “too cemented,” he says, Fik and his Ide­ation Group surveyed staff, convened focus groups, and organized gatherings of “change champions,” the 50 or so most socially networked employees as determ­­ined by an in-house questionnaire. Hokey corporate-speak aside, it was an earnest no-holds-barred endeavor that allowed workers to evaluate their superiors, speak their minds, and lobby for improvements. “Please disagree” is how Bianchi has described the tone that was set.

The tangible outcomes range from where the company’s various departments are now located within the building to the wealth of natural light (the top-ranking request) and better temperature control—not to mention an ax on the personal crock pots that had sent wafts of cooked pheasant and chili cheese dip up the noses of wincing colleagues. (“Being vegetarian, I can’t even think about it,” Straebel says.) Arising from employee participation—and banned crock pots ­notwithstanding—perhaps what the openness of the ­building best represents is a new openness at the company.

It also expresses the firm’s openness about itself. “If we weren’t in the furniture business, we probably would not have done this project,” says Dick Haworth, somewhat surprisingly explaining the building as a business decision rather than an act of altruistic vision. To be sure, Haworth’s transformation into a savvier, more organic company has been less revolutionary than methodical, as summed up by its tagline: “Change by design.”

It’s too early to say how well the facility works, though initial reviews seem resoundingly positive. Some things could have been done better: “There’s a painful angularity here; everything is rectilinear,” Fik says. “I think we could use more curves.” But according to Fik, the company’s experience with the building is already informing its product line. And the culture? “I don’t think cohesion will go up, but morale will,” he says, attributing the former to elements that go beyond the location of partition walls. As for the latter, though, it seems he’s already right. “When I first walked in, I got emotional, got tears in my eyes,” Ebihara says. “This is not like any Haworth I remember.”