From Site Selection magazine, March 1999
M A N A G E M E N T S T R A T E G Y
Keeping Sprint's New
HQ Campus on Track
Margaret P. Latshaw, Ph.D., is in the midst of what will likely be a high point in her career in corporate real estate. Latshaw is group manager/strategic planning & program management at Sprint Corp., which happens to be building a new, world headquarters campus in Overland Park, Kan. She is responsible for the development and implementation of programming, planning and the operational integration for campus office space at the 200-acre (81-hectare), 3.9 million-sq.-ft. (362,300-sq.-m.) facility. When complete, the campus will feature 18 buildings and 16 parking garages; it will house 14,000 employees when fully built out.
Ground was broken in July 1997, and the first set of employees will move into the first building on the new campus in July 1999. All Sprint employees in the greater Kansas City area will be situated on the campus by 2001. In the meantime, Latshaw, in conjunction with Faye Manker, Sprint's vice president, corporate real estate, is coordinating the efforts of architecture and design specialists, developers, construction managers and consultants.
Site Selection:What is the design theme underlying the planning of the new headquarters campus?
 Margaret P. Latshaw: Sprint's campus is designed to meet the vision of our chairman, William T. Esrey, for a work environment that enables the idea of a seamless Sprint, with interaction across all levels of the company. It must also be a pleasant and effective space that enhances our ability to recruit and retain top talent to the Kansas City area, and it needs to be cost effective and also provide a strong corporate image for Sprint. We currently lease space in over 50 buildings in Kansas and Missouri. It is not easy to be seamless when your work force is scattered in so many buildings across a 50-mile [80-km.] radius. This sprawl is distinctly not friendly, it's not fast, it's not flexible, and it is definitely not effective for the Sprint associates who need to meet with their colleagues in places all across town on a frequent basis.
Above right: Margaret P. Latshaw, group manager/strategic planning & program management at Sprint.
SS: Will the campus have a recognizable identity?
MPL: Some recent examples of corporate design are built around the themes of town, neighborhood, street and home base. In our case, the lead architect [The Hillier Co.] and our construction manager [the J.E. Dunn Construction Co.] are designing and building on the scale of a town. If incorporated, this campus would be the 27th largest town in Kansas. The buildings are on a human scale. There is no high rise; the tallest building is five stories. The campus is pedestrian-friendly. Most of the parking is on the outside of a loop road. It will take at most 10 minutes to walk from the north end of the campus to the south end. Arcades or covered walkways connect all of the buildings.
The outdoors will also be friendly. We accomplished a 60 percent space-to-green ratio -- we've been able to avoid the more typical suburban sea of asphalt. There will be courtyards and fountains and a seven-acre [2.8-hectare] lake with wetlands. For the athletically inclined, there are jogging trails and playing fields.
 SS: What employee amenities are being built into the campus?
MPL: To be effective a town really needs to have the right mix of amenities. We've conducted employee surveys and focus groups and [analysis] of other companies' campuses. The programming architect for our campus [Gould Evans Goodman Associates] is using much of this information to program what we're calling our special spaces in some of our amenities. This campus will have a 75,000-square-foot (6,900-sq.-m.) fitness center, 20,000 square feet (1,850 sq. m.) of retail space, including a dry cleaner, ATMs, a post office, and 50,000 square feet (4,600 sq. m.) of clustered conference space. About 80,000 square feet (7,400 sq. m.) across the campus will be devoted to food in one way or another. The campus will include a customer technology center where we'll showcase our products and services. In total there will be over a half-million square feet (46,450 sq. m.) of amenities. This is a campus with a very human face and a friendly and inviting scale.
Above left: An aerial view of building construction at Sprint's new headquarters site in Overland Park, Kan.
SS: How will the campus design encourage communication among divisions and employees?
MPL: To enable interaction among groups, we're designing wide staircases to encourage chance encounters. We'll also have what we call pop-sites, or interaction nodes, which are places where people can go with their coffee, pick up their mail, make copies, or just go for a break during the day. There will be a lot of meeting rooms, large and small ones. We'll even have some rooms we're calling solitude nooks, for when you absolutely have to have privacy or just get away from it all. Finally, there's the home base, or universal workstation. Each one will be an 8-by-9.5 foot (245-290 cm.) universal workstation.
SS: How do the workstations account for worker and departmental mobility?
MPL: Sprint anticipates groups working there will change often. Department A is here today and gone tomorrow. Churn, where employees change from one project or team to another during the year, is relatively high at Sprint. In any given year, about half the employees will move from their home base to another home base, often in another building. So we in the real estate group need to plan to make this kind of movement as fast and economical as possible. What makes this design fast and effective for us is standardizing on a grid. Modularity enables a quick change of entire work groups or departments.
Also, we've made interchangeable what we're calling "department support space." Let's say Dept. A might have had a training room, and they move out and the group that comes in has an equipment room or a library. These departmental support spaces are also laid out on a grid and are interchangeable from a space perspective and in terms of how we're setting them up.
SS: Some would argue that a one-size-fits-all approach makes a work space more functional than friendly.
MPL: In this case, one size fits all means that one size can be customized to fit all. We have a menu of options to customize the home base. The cabling we have in our workstations and the stackable panels will enable us to reconfigure the space quickly to meet the requirements of the incoming group. Standardizing on the grid makes the design fast and cost-effective for managing churn. But customizing the home base through a menu of options makes it functional and friendly for the employees.
SS: Was the point ever made during planning of the campus design that the end product might in fact be too pleasant a place to work and not be conducive to inventing and selling new products?
MPL: It did not. It's a tight labor market in metro Kansas City and nationwide. Corporations are doing whatever they can to help recruit and retain people. Some of these amenities are becoming the norm, and companies need to consider them. They must make it as convenient as possible for employees to be as productive as possible every minute of the day.
SS: How will Sprint determine whether employee productivity improves at the new campus?
MPL: There is a real challenge before all corporations to actually measure productivity of knowledge workers. We will conduct pre- and post-move [employee] satisfaction surveys to gauge the level of their satisfaction with their physical work environment. We'll do that annually so as to track that over time. I'm not sure yet how we'll make the leap between that and actual productivity. But we'll work with the human resources function to make sure they incorporate questions in orientation sessions concerning how important the work environment was in decisions to work for Sprint.
SS: How is Sprint planning space requirements on the new campus relative to projected growth?
MPL: We have in place a process for forecasting growth in the business units. Twice a year we go to all the cost centers and have them forecast their space requirements for us on a two-and-a-half-year rolling basis. Our programming architect on the campus project is using the forecast review of September 1998, which is effective through 2001. That is the foundation for assigning real estate in the first phase, the million square feet we'll begin to occupy in July.
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