We’re coming up on our six month anniversary since BlueFletch moved into our new digs at Southern Dairies.
The overwhelming response has been positive so I wanted to share what we did, what’s worked well and what hasn’t.
Welcome to BlueFletch
- Large, clean and crisp signage (thanks to FASTSIGNS Atlanta)
- Dogs encouraged, but also taking precaution to reduce legal liability
- Tore out the outdated secretary desk so Lauren isn’t stranded by herself all day
Conference Rooms
- Tech friendly – Rooms throughout the office have flatscreen TVs, AppleTVs, Chromecasts and Chromeboxes
- Huge whiteboards throughout
- “Good enough” chairs – While we didn’t remove the chairs altogether, we still want to encourage short meetings
Presentation Space
- Flexible arrangements make it easy to host Lunch & Learns, Meetups, World Cup viewing parties or Drone flying practice
- Large high definition projector + built in room audio
- (Ordered but not delivered yet) Casual lounge furniture so employees can break away from the desk for creative work sessions
Workstations
- Aeron chairs, large monitors and Ikea desks
- Power and cord management built into the desks
- Collaborative, open layout
- Option for employees to convert to standing desks
Break Room
- Stocked fridges and snack rooms
- Jura coffee machine to keep the crew energized
- Shuffleboard table, which unlike pool or ping pong tables, is easy for any skill level and quick so there’s always time for a game
- Strategically separated from the rest of the office to avoid distractions
5 Things That’ve Worked Well
1. Location & community – Being a part of the resurgence of the Ponce City Market area is fantastic and we love Hothouse, Cool Girls and the rest of our neighbors at Southern Dairies. Oh and when 4th & Swift fires up their big green egg around 4:00pm every afternoon – watch out!
2. Tearing down, not building up – During the office build out, the general theme was to tear down walls and make more windows. The openness of our last office was one of the top benefits and we didn’t want to lose that.
3. Ikea furniture – While Ikea furniture isn’t high end, it’s very utilitarian. Ikea desks are affordable and easy to add & arrange, making for a perfect short term solution during BlueFletch’s rapid growth.
4. Getting people back into the office – While many companies are encouraging working remotely, we’ve worked to create an environment that our employees and clients love to be at.
5. Lunch & learns – Every Friday a BlueFletch-er hosts a lunch & learn. The topics have been awesome (last week Alex educated us up on Drones) and it’s become a standing ritual that no matter where you’re working during the week, you want to make sure to come in on Friday.
5 Things To Improve
1. Too loud – Whether it’s the echo-y halls or the minimal soundproofing between conference rooms, we need to reduce the noise distractions for people working.
2. Consistent theme – At first we didn’t do a great job maintaining a consistent look and feel. Too many colors, mis-matched furniture, etc. We’re gradually correcting this to give the office a more cohesive look.
3. Going it alone – We’re a bunch of problem solvers and self-starters. As a result we wanted to do a lot of the work ourselves. What happened? Projects lost priority to “real” work and took too long. Going forward we’re outsourcing any task we can.
4. Estimating space needs – We’ve grown 100% in the past 12 months, making it tough to predict how much space we’ll need going forward. On top of that, as a services company you might have 3/4 of the company working at a client site on Tuesday, and then 99% of the team in the office on Friday.
5. To be determined – Most of the feedback is from the squeaky wheels. What does everyone else think? Time to find out.
In the end you’re not going to please everyone. We’re getting pretty close though and we’re not stopping. The BlueFletch office is constantly improving so a lot of what you see here might not even be around the next time you stop by.