How We Built an Office That Works for Employees and Guests by Alexander Saint-Amand

In a piece for The Huffington Post, GLG CEO Alexander Saint-Amand shares how our office was built to serve GLG employees as well as clients and guests who are always welcome to work out of our office.

When visitors come into our new office in Midtown Manhattan, one of the first questions we often get is, “Can I have my own desk here?”

I tell people they are welcome to work out of our office, but that no one has a permanently assigned spot, not even me, the CEO. Still, the request validates our approach to designing an office our guests would want to use.

As a company that brings together top thinkers, we needed to design a space that fostered conversation and learning. A place that feels intellectually alive and engaged. We opted against an office with personal desks and instead created a space that gives everyone a seat at the proverbial table.

We are a global, 1,000-person professional learning company that brings people and businesses together with experts to help them learn about their complex strategic challenges. Our 65,000-square-foot New York headquarters is home to almost 300 of us. Each month GLG hosts dozens of roundtable events for our clients and experts; we wanted our headquarters to be a place where they could work and mingle before and after these sessions.

So when it came to our new headquarters, we were looking for more than just an office. The space would need to support a core aspect of our business. We wanted an office that combined the intellectual curiosity and community of a university campus and the urgency of a newsroom. We wanted space for people to be private and a place where people could come to work, learn, recharge, and be inspired.

Read more about GLG’s global headquarters on The Huffington Post here.