— पाँच हजार छह सौ अट्ठासी —
Boy, is it a good thing I already
posted all about my weekend yesterday, because I have had almost no time for it this morning.
I had the inaugural meeting of the Office Transition Team at 9:00 this morning. All but two of us met in the "Globe" conference room, which has nine chairs and only two were left empty—two people logged into the meeting remotely, which means that had they been in-person, we would have filled all the seats at the table. Otherwise, there was Mark, VP of Store Development, who basically helped kick off this group; Sara J from HR, who is the "Project Lead" of this group; and four people from other departments: Mike W from Marketing + Purpose; Lori from Store Development; Andrew from IT (filling in for Chris L who is out today); Jami from Store Operations; Grant, the new Office Administrator who was tagging alonng with Jami because he wasn't fully set up at his desk yet; and myself, from Merchandising. (Connecting remotely were Katie from Finance; and John B, the new Executive Assistant).
Anyway. That made ten people in the meeting, nine of us actually on the Office Transition Team, eight if you exclude Mark who it sounds like will not be as present in every meeting we have.
Before the meeting, Mark emailed out a few documents I was so interested in, I blew through about an hour before we even started th e meeting. One was a floor plan of the original Downtown retail store, with a red line through it indicating the separation between new office space and the new "small format" store; another was the current, working floor plan of the new office space. I found myself compiling a lot of comparative numbers between our current office and this new one. For instance, the total square footage will shrink by slightly more than half; the number of desks, however, will shrink by only about a third.
More than a third of the total
desktop space will be shrunk, however. Our current desks are L-shaped, with only one side rigged as sit-stand desks. Only the sit-stand portions are getting moved, and even on those, a full foot of length is getting cut off.
Even though I am one of the few people who works at the office every day and thus will likely get my own dedicated work space that I don't have to share, I am going to get a
lot less space to put personal stuff, photos or memorabilia or whatever.
There's a lot to be excited about too, though. And we were told that each of us was nominated by the LT (Leadership Team) member of our team to be on this team, and the more I think about it the more I think I was by far the most logical choice for Merchandising. I am far more locked in with all this shit than I am with just about anything else in my job. (Not that I'm not locked in elsewhere, but a lot of the other stuff I do now I can kind of do in my sleep.)
— पाँच हजार छह सौ अट्ठासी —
— पाँच हजार छह सौ अट्ठासी —
Oh! Another thing I got clarified in that meeting: the lease on the current office ends at the end of September. If we stay longer, the rent doubles. If we move earlier, we're still beholden to the lease. I had the impression that it would be fourth-quarter before we moved, but it's quite a bit sooner than I expected: current target is actually August 1. And that is
the exact date we moved into this space back in 2016. That lineup kind of makes sense, though, as Mark noted, given that a nine-year lease would mean it ends in the summer of 2025.
Also, Mark brought up something about the current office space that was a point I never thought of, and am thinking now is a valid point. I've been stuck on the idea that we're moving largely because store staff resent this beautiful office space and think of us all sitting in an ivory tower—and, make no mistake, that's still a big part of it. But, Mark also talked this morning about when he came to interview for this job, and clocked the beautiful space immediately. He envisioned a lot of vendors seeing this space and immediately assuming we can afford higher margins than we actually can.
It turns out there are multiple layers to the utility of optics that convey something a bit more aligned with humility.
I should note that many people voiced similar concerns when we first moved here, and Cate, who was CEO at the time, always had an answer: we found the office furniture at a discount, we got a great deal on the lease, blah blah blah. That lease rental rate always came with an expiraton date, mind you. We haven't had the greatest relatonship with the property owners, and thankfully Rainier Square is owned by someone else (University of Washington, actually) and thus far the relationship is reportedly much better.
In other words, there's a ton of both pros and cons to the new office space, some of it depending on how you look at it. For now, I'm looking forward to the move with much more excitement than treipidation. I trust that over time questions will be answered in a satisfactory way, and as someone on the Office Transition Team, I'll be a key part of facilitating that.
— पाँच हजार छह सौ अट्ठासी —
[posted 12:34 pm]
