Neon-coloured furniture punctuates black metal and wood features. Photo / Michael Craig
How do you get 60 per cent of your staff to come back to the office now they're all so used to working from home?
It's a question many large Auckland employers are asking amid changing Covid-19 guidelines.
Someone who has recently answered that question is Kylie Mooney, chief executive of lawyers MC, New Zealand's largest litigation firm, which has just completed a new office centre in the city's CBD.
A team she was part of has recently finished the interior design and fit-out to create what could be this country's most upmarket offices, at 8 Hardinge St, near the Spark building and not far from Victoria Park.
In 2016, MC had moved to the top or fifth level of BDO House, 2 Graham St. In November this year it left that space and moved across the road to the new premises. Mooney isn't specific about the exact spend, but she is definite about one thing: if you make the office this good, staff won't be able to resist coming in to work.
MC, previously called Meredith Connell, has 230 Auckland staff who were forced to split into two buildings after only six years, thanks to the firm's unexpected growth.
Mooney says more than half of the staff have returned to the office full-time, bucking the trend where many other Auckland office workers are still working from home. "I asked the IT team to help me. They did some analysis and found out that 140 mobile phones signed in to our WiFi on December 7 so that makes it 60 per cent who have returned to work."
Staff were invited to return to unpack boxes last month and when they saw the new office, "people unpacked and chose to come back".
The MC Centre is on levels six and seven of the new Hardinge St building by Mansons TCLM and has its own entrance way beside the Spark campus, as well as basement carparking off Fanshawe St.
Mooney, MC managing partner Steve Haszard and Wellington's David Lambie of TwentyTwo Independent Property Advisers visited about 16 Sydney office blocks before deciding on the new interior fit-out, "and we quickly found what we liked and what we didn't like," she says.
Not everything went as planned: the shift was meant to happen in September but lockdowns delayed that to November 8.
"In some ways, there were silver linings because there were still pallets stuck on ships," Mooney concedes.
So what's inside the new MC Centre?
• In-your-face interior design by Jasmax's Valentina Machina (now of Warren & Mahoney) and Anna Manson.
• Offices with a wellness certification, including a reflection room where people can meditate, pray or simply reflect.
• A wild botanical-themed cafe/kitchen Te Kāuta - meaning kitchen or cookhouse - by Sophie Burns of Burning Red Design.
• New technology: staff got the latest iPhones as their IDs, and linkups to Zoom and Teams on walls with big screens. They can share content from a laptop, tablet or phone using Zoom, and every room, allows conference calling without the need for any additional gear. The real star is the fully WiFi-delivered computer network. Staff can work from their own desk but can also move to any other part of the office, reducing the reliance on in-room support and cutting device management overheads.
• The services of indoor plant design experts Outside In, with 1600 live plants laid out terrarium-style in internal "gardens" that are visible across the floors. A variety of plants including ferns and palms are growing in pots, hidden beneath a mesh-like solid form made for the space, topped with bark to give a realistic garden-style effect.
• More room: up from 3500sq m previously to 5500sq m now, but fewer carparks.
• No hot-desking. "People like their own space and they all have individual lockers, tall enough to hang full-length gowns," Mooney says.
• Six specifically-themed work zones or areas, with artwork to match. The six themes are: land; people; immigration and exploration; diversity; innovation; and capital - "because we're not embarrassed or afraid about the fact that we're here to make money".
• New furniture which punctuates the green, wood and black interior with fluorescent brightness.
• A replica High Court room, complete with fluorescent panel lighting and a coat of arms above the judge's chair. This allows the lawyers and their clients to practice in a life-like courtroom setting, including giving evidence, cross-examination and bail hearings.
• An enormous Karl Maughan work from the previous site has gone to MC's Wellington offices. Now, the art in MC Central is by Israel Tangaroa Birch, Xoë Hall, Yuki Kihara, Evan Woodruffe, Mary-Louise Browne, Michael Hight and Charles and Janine Williams.
Raji Rai, a senior project manager at the Building Intelligence Group, headed the property management team. Engineering was by Calibre Group and Agile Engineering. The IT was by Provision Technologies and Kordia. Impact Interiors did the interior fit-out.
MC is a blended firm: all its litigators, including those in its 40-strong Crown specialist group, work on commercial and other civil matters. Except for a small number of specialists, all its remaining 120 lawyers also spend about 20 per cent of their time on criminal prosecution. This ensures the Crown has available to it a huge resource of litigators to prosecute criminal cases, with expertise in every area of the law, the firm says.
Most of its work and revenue now comes from litigation which does not fall under the Crown Warrant.
A significant share of its work comes from central and local government agencies like the Serious Fraud Office and Financial Markets Authority, and that includes the landmark prosecutions of finance company directors in the early to mid-2010s.
MC also does work for the Commerce Commission, such as the West Auckland free-range eggs case; the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, including on the DeMarco case involving Sir Peter Jackson's vintage planes; the Ministry of Education on the leaky schools case against Carter Holt Harvey; Worksafe on the inquiry into Whakaari White Island; and the NZ Police, including on the Comanchero proceeds of crime case.
The firm says that growth in the mid- to late-2010s meant MC had outgrown its Graham St offices despite having moved there only in 2016. By 2019, it faced a choice of capping its numbers, accommodating growth by leasing extra office space or moving to one new site.
The partners opted for continued growth and the efficiency gains and cultural benefits of being on one site, choosing one new 5500sq m space and becoming the cornerstone tenant of the new MC Centre. It expects to have a total team of 300 by the beginning of 2023, it says.
The first decision MC made when starting its interior design was that Te Tiriti o Waitangi would be featured at its heart. He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nu Tirene (the Declaration of Independence of the United Tribes of New Zealand) stands alongside Te Tiriti and is a stunning piece of information-heavy, written art.
In terms of the wider design brief, MC says it sees itself in competition with the likes of Russell McVeagh, Chapman Tripp and Bell Gully - not so much for clients, but for talent.
"It therefore made an early decision the MC Centre would be primarily designed to appeal to New Zealand's best legal talent in their 20s and early 30s rather than to impress corporate clients," the firms says. "Its objective is that its current and future staff can be assured they will be operating out of the best work environment in New Zealand."
Mooney says: "MC has always understood we are in tough competition for talented people, not just with other top New Zealand law firms but with the very best law firms in the world. In a post-Covid world, we're also competing with home, the local café and even the local park or beach as a place for people to meet their employment obligations in the professional services industries. We believe it is important to have as many of our team as possible in the office each day, so we have worked incredibly hard to make sure this is a place they want to come to each day."
The MC Centre has a six-star rating under the Green Building Council's Green Star programme. MC is New Zealand's first professional services firm to achieve WELL v2 Certification from the International WELL Building Institute.
That meant it had to provide evidence - and in some cases make improvements - to meet standards measuring 108 features covering 10 concepts of air, water, nourishment, light, movement, thermal comfort, sound, materials, mind and community.
So the stairs carry artwork telling how climbing improves health. The ambient temperature is slightly below other offices to handle the high plant numbers. Most of the roof is a glass atrium, flooding not only the MC offices at the top with light but allowing daylight to flow through to other floors via light wells.
The lawyers and support staff have different spaces to work in different ways. These range from their own desk in their team space or neighbourhood, to silent concentration spaces for individual work, to 12 collaboration and 11 meeting rooms for teamwork, to private phone boxes to take calls, to two terrariums evoking the New Zealand bush, to the firm's brightly-coloured area including the café, kitchen, barista bar and various seating options.
The library is no longer behind double-glazing as that wasn't seen as necessary. A heritage area is a nod to MC's 100-year history as the Crown Solicitor in Auckland.
Two seminar rooms and a training room have been developed to support learning and development, especially with an IT component, for up to 10 staff at a time. Mooney says that when 10,000 documents suddenly arrive, it is now able to gather perhaps the 10 or so lawyers working on that case into the new IT room to work together.
Facilities for staff cycling, running and walking to work, bike storage and charging stations for electric bikes are in the basement.
Are there any downsides? Perhaps the huge size of the black rooftop plant room looming over and blocking the northern waterfront aspect from some places. But MC has tried to turn even this into a positive: "A 5m x 3m TV screen was put in to hide the building's plant room on the roof and to help celebrate aspects of contemporary Aotearoa and MC's successes."
Another downside: the firm is now on two floors instead of one, but it does have stairs between them for ease of access.
And the cost? It might have been about $10 million, but no one's saying, just as no one said the previous offices might have cost about $5m to fit out.
Construction business erected one of NZ's most complex buildings at the university campus.