When the New York-based staff of The Boston Consulting Group decided to leave the midtown office that had been their home since 2002, they knew they wanted to create a more comfortable, welcoming space.
The global management consulting firm, which was launched in 1963, was third on Glassdoor’s list of the best places to work in 2017. But since the old office’s interior design and architecture didn’t accurately reflect the personality of the company, they wanted to make sure their new office did.
“The best decision I made was to encourage the designer to push as far as she could go in terms of a non-corporate look and feel,” senior partner Ross Love told Business Insider during a recent visit to BCG’s new office in the Hudson Yards development of Manhattan. Love was part of the internal team that was tasked with overseeing the design of the new space.
The layout was designed with the “collision coefficient” in mind — an idea that Love got while visiting with Zappos founder Tony Hsieh.
“[Hsieh is] a bit of a guru on design … I went on a tour of Zappos out in Las Vegas, and he talked about how you could deliberately design an office to maximize the number of collisions [between people],” he said.
This, in theory, could create a more efficient work day, cutting down on the time spent on formal meetings, email replies, and phone calls. Ahead, take a tour of the new, thoughtfully-designed offices, where more than 500 New York-based BCG employees spend their days.
