By: Julie Wanzer, LEED AP
Denver, CO – CoreNet Global Colorado organized a tour of CBRE’s new downtown Denver office in an event called “Coming Undesked” on Wednesday, July 20, 2016. Located on the 32nd floor of the 17th Street Plaza building, the 360-degree views of the surrounding Denver area into the Rocky Mountains provided a picturesque background for the networking event. Attendees congregated in what Pete Schippits, Senior Managing Director, CBRE Colorado Market Leader, calls the “heart” of the office, which includes a concierge style lobby with an interactive media area, complete bar and open seating.
Herman Miller sponsored the event where CBRE panelists, Pete Schippits and Carson Erard, Senior Associate, CBRE Workplace Strategy, discussed how a traditional commercial real estate office was 
transformed into a free-address, tech-enabled paperless environment.
Mr. Erard explained how this Workplace 360 environment aligned with CBRE’s corporate vision to optimize the space with free-address capabilities, reinvest in technology, drive community through knowledge transfer among all of the brokers, and elevate the level of service CBRE can provide to its clients through a concierge model lobby. He also noted that CBRE hosted a 12-month change leadership program that allowed the CBRE Denver office to cut down from 577 files to 155 files in storage (a 75% reduction) and benefit from an employee-led change committee that helped employees be vested in the office transformation process.
Mr. Schippits highlighted the strategic connections their new office space allowed for, where brokers can meet with clients here in their office for coffee or a drink at the bar, instead of off-site. He also touched on some unexpected outcomes of the new space where senior-level brokers are not using the private offices, instead they are congregating in the open huddle spaces to collaborate with their teams. With no assigned offices or desks except for target “neighborhoods” based on CBRE’s various business lines, employees are interacting more with each other and are hardly ever in the same place twice.
[Editor’s Note: Boots Construction Company was the contractor and Gensler, who has their office on the first floor of the 17th Street Plaza building, served as the architect.]
Photos courtesy of Julie Wanzer, Business Rewritten
