It’s not often that anyone discusses the benefits of the COVID pandemic. One of the tragedy’s disruptions, however, changed the way we work, and for some companies that’s turned out to be a net-plus.
Patrick McDonough, vice president for business operations at altafiber, the former Cincinnati Bell, manages the company’s seven floors of office space in the Atrium 2 building on East Fourth Street downtown. “We always had a bit of excess space, so the concept of subleasing some of it had been out there,” he says. “When the pandemic hit, we contemplated a hybrid work environment, so we decided to pare our space to two floors.”
McDonough was tasked with two challenges: Design those two floors to help entice employees to return to the office at least on a part-time basis and sublease the extra space in a local commercial real estate market with a 25 percent-plus vacancy rate. “We had offices around the perimeter in the old design, and all that drywall blocked views of the city, and in particular the stadiums and the river,” he says. “We blew all of that out and put workstations toward the perimeter, lowered the walls, and put soft seating in between. We also leased a parking garage at the corner of Main and Third streets and subsidized it for employees.”
The resulting office layout offered a welcoming environment for altafiber staff to come back into the office. “When you see people only on video screens, it’s hard to build camaraderie, which helps people work together effectively,” says McDonough. “We have about 450 people who work out of this office in corporate functions such as accounting, finance, IT, and marketing, and we peak at about 280 on any one day. Inertia is a powerful thing to break, but we seem to have done that. The vibrancy has exceeded my expectations.”
Employees aren’t required to work in the office, but not everyone is wired the same. Some thrive at home where they can multitask with personal chores, while others enjoy the social atmosphere among colleagues. It also helps that C-Suite executives sit among the masses.
“(CEO) Leigh Fox was adamant about the fact that everybody was going to get a workstation,” McDonough says. “That was helpful to me because every time somebody would ask for an office, I could say, Well, Leigh doesn’t have an office. (Laughs). But we do have private areas for conversations, phone calls, and things like that.”
The egalitarian environment has been so popular that McDonough remodeled another half-floor for more workstations. While he oversaw that project, he managed to sublease the company’s remaining footprint, no easy task in a still-volatile commercial market. “We were fortunate, and we worked hard,” he says. “Just a couple of months ago, I subleased the last excess square footage. So while the Cincinnati region is at 26 percent vacancy, we’re at 0 percent.”
The renovations were finished in November 2023. To celebrate altafiber’s physical makeover, new signage featuring its distinctive white-and-blue logo was added atop the south-facing wall of Atrium 2.
Photographs by Chris Von Holle