Custer, Inc.’s Post

Transcript

The original plan was we needed new carpet after the pandemic. The carpet did not survive the pandemic and this was a major scope creep grew into a whole new furnishings renovation, etcetera. But it started out as just needing to replace the carpets and then we went further and further from there. We were in a situation where we had had everybody back in the office every day. We didn't have enough seats for everybody, so we had to be hybrid and. Have people in part of the time, but we wanted to make it a more inviting and have some growth capacity going forward. Working with the Custer team for a little over two years now has been an amazing experience. They've been incredibly patient with us. It probably doesn't normally take this long to do it, but we made it take that long. And they were patient though and made us feel like we were their only customer. And that's an attribute. And no matter what you do, if you're serving customers, if you can make them feel that way. You really hit the mark. We talked a lot with Shannon at the beginning of the process about our culture at Skytron and how much we care about our employees. And we did this project for a lot of different reasons. But one of the biggest things was the investment that we wanted to make in our employees and something that would really make them feel good coming into work every day. A lot of the questions we ask in those initial meetings were around, could you work differently if you had to look at things through a different light? And maybe share a space or come in certain days and work remote other days. They were already somewhat hybrid. So they were trying to look at strategically keeping that as part of their culture, but supporting it with the furniture that made their employees more productive and focused and keeping their employees engaged. And after COVID, they realized, OK, we need to get our employees back in the office and we are growing. We want to attract and retain new talent, but keep our existing talent. Hay, what does that look like for us and what do we need to do to make that happen? And it's definitely not staying the way that we're working right now. If we truly want to be and continue to be the innovative company that we are, it needs to look different. The most proud of the fact that we were able to pull this project together with amazing teams both internally and externally, we are able to start the process of cultivating. Communications from the game, we had all the right people in the right places ready to do the right thing. And to me, when you have that baseline in place, you know that magic is going to happen. But I would say one thing to touch on is the fact that we not only thought about what we needed to do to create an office to provide form and function choice and control better and stronger layers of collaboration by introducing different types of spaces, but also different layers of technology, right? What can we do to make sure that we are maintaining a level of collaboration for folks that are actually reporting on site every day? We want to make sure there's not a delta that is felt because we do have people coming and going, But guess what? They're able to check into a space, they're able to utilize Zoom and we've made it easy for everybody to quickly plug in and check in. But the way that we've created the space, if you take a look around the space here, it's it's a collaborative type space along with having some more. Touchdown type areas, but allows for folks to come together in ways that we were not able to before the pandemic. We're really proud of incorporating all of that because again, collaboration with something that we did not want to discount, it's very important to us. I think one of the biggest hurdles that the team experienced was letting go of some of those traditional barriers that they were used to in the office space and giving it fresh perspective of, OK, I don't know what I don't know. What could this look like? And that's where we were there to provide thought starters and space planning ideas to get the initial conversation going. We toured them through Steelcase, which I think was really important for people to see what these different spaces could look like. And I think they were really inspired by how we work at Custer and kind of how radical that is compared to a traditional workspace design. And having them through our space I think made a huge impact for them to say, OK, this is maybe. A little extreme, and that's not exactly what we envisioned for us, but what is that happy middle ground that we could get to? That makes sense for Skytron? And I think it was important for them to see that so that they could get out of that old school mentality of what a traditional office space looks like and what a hybrid unassigned workstation type space could look and feel like. It's better than what I could have dreamt. I know we had our vision. But working with Custer and working with Alex and Shannon, we were really able to bring our vision to life. At the end of the day, this is for them. This is for our employees to have a place to come where they can be at their best. And if they're happy, we're happy. I'm so happy that we were able to take this opportunity further than what we had. And I think that we've definitely set ourselves up for success for many years to come.