CREATING CULTURE – NAMB HQ RENOVATION
Alpharetta, GA – In addition to planting churches and training church leaders, developing and maintaining a positive and efficient workplace is a top priority for the North American Mission Board (NAMB). Achieving a healthy working environment requires strong leadership. Sustaining this type workplace can only be done by creating a culture that empowers its people to be successful.
Creating culture is not something that happens overnight. It’s a long-term process that cannot be fast-tracked. Thanks to the direction of its leadership in recent years, NAMB has been successful in creating a positive workplace culture by focusing on the strengths of its people to accomplish its goals. After effectively improving nearly all aspects of their workplace, NAMB leaders realized the importance of updating outdated facilities to adapt to the modern needs of a mobile workforce. In addition, NAMB wanted to enhance its abilities to provide training on a larger scale.
Built in 1995, the NAMB headquarters is a six-story building that has been home to the organization since the building first opened. The building houses NAMB’s diverse workforce that includes numerous teams of people – church planting, evangelism and chaplaincy, marketing and events, finance and mission properties, information services – just to name a few. Additionally, NAMB headquarters provides training for church leaders from all over North America, houses the call center and supply distributions for their crisis response program SEND Relief, and is the source of all media creation for the organization and its networks.
After over 20 years of use with only a few minor changes to the interior space, the building needed a major update in order to meet the ever-growing demands of its modern-day workforce. Understanding the complexity and scale that accompanies a project of this nature, NAMB turned to MG+A for help. In early 2017, MG+A began space planning and design for what would be a complete transformation of the headquarters.
Initial conversations between NAMB and MG+A were focused on how to repurpose existing space to meet the expanding needs of the organization. However, the key to the overall success of the project was NAMB’s willingness to allow MG+A full access to rethink the entire facility and how it functioned. The trust afforded by this approach yielded a space plan that not only modernized the facility, but also provided the transformation needed to accommodate administrative functions, new mobile work spaces, collaborative spaces and world class training rooms.
Project Highlights include the following:
- Renovated all six floors of building totaling nearly 135,000 sf
- 2nd floor converted to a “training center” featuring 6 training rooms with seating capacities ranging from 40 to 200
- Opened office spaces by incorporating interior glass walls for individual offices, and open-office furniture for support areas
- Provided “huddle rooms” on floors three, four and five, complete with video conferencing systems
- Added “monumental stair” to connect main lobby with second floor training center
- Installed two 231-inch curved video walls
- Retrofitted existing main level auditorium with new audio, video and lighting, including RGBW (colored) LED house lights
