Moving offices: How do you capture a company’s culture in a physical space?
Like so many growing startups, Quartz has a space problem — specifically, that we keep running out of it. When we launched the business news organization in 2012, about 20 New York-based employees squeezed into a small office in SoHo. We outgrew it by the end of 2013 and moved to a much bigger headquarters near Union Square. Now we’re out of room again and moving to a still-larger spot in the Flatiron District, on the fourth floor of 675 Avenue of the Americas, where we’ve signed a five-year lease.
Moving offices can be a pain, but it’s also an opportunity to take stock of how the company has grown and what it could still become. With this move, we’ve put an emphasis on capturing the culture, or Quartziness, that defines Quartz employees and their work: global, nerdy, creative, and so on. (For a taste of that culture, check out photos of the team on Tumblr.)
One Quartzy trait is experimentation, so we’ve decided to make this move public in a new publication here on Medium called The Office. It’s all about this underlying question shared by so many growing firms: How do you capture a company’s culture in a physical space? We’ll also discuss less existential, but nonetheless important, questions like how to do standing desks and why videoconferencing is still such a struggle. Our hope is that you’ll find the discussion valuable and even help us answer a few questions.
This diary is part of a new obsession at Quartz, also called The Office, which is exploring the future of work, from management structures to the gig economy to distributed workplaces to compensation.
Contributions here on Medium may come from all kinds of staff at Quartz and our parent company Atlantic Media. The broader public is invited to respond and contribute to the publication, as well. We hope you’ll join us on the journey from 233 Park Avenue South to 675 Avenue of the Americas.
Today, we’re starting with the architects’ initial vision for the space…
