The British Council for Offices may not quite be a household name, but as its eloquent and well-spoken chief executive Richard Kauntze explains, most of us could benefit from its services.
‘We’ll never be as well known as the BBC or the AA,’ says Kauntze, ‘but what we want to do is make our work relevant, to help people understand the relationship between people and property and why that’s important.’
Since starting as the council’s CEO a decade ago, Kauntze has done much to bolster the reputation of the organisation. His first move was to relocate its offices from Reading to London. ‘I wanted us to be accessible to the majority of our members. Although we are a national organisation, a lot of our members are based in London and those who aren’t can generally get there easily,’ he says.
Kauntze’s mission from the start has been to raise awareness of the BCO and what it can do for companies of all kinds and all sizes. ‘The BCO is quite a hard organisation to explain, so I have changed the image and given us a strapline which is “Defining Excellence in Office Space” – that really defines what we do,’ he says.
He also decided to centre the organization on its research programme, which complies reports, best-practice guides, briefing notes and discussion papers, and which is now available to members through an online research portal.
Kauntze realised that one of the best ways to bring the BCO to the attention of those who could benefit from its expertise was through its annual awards programme.
‘I changed the awards competition, which I think had quite a low profile and now has a very high profile. The awards are particularly important to us because a lot of what we do can be slightly abstruse, and what the awards do very effectively is demonstrate to the outside world why we think a particular office is a good one.’
Kings Place in London’s Kings Cross, a mixed-used building by architecture practice Dixon Jones, which was featured in FX in November 2008, won the BCO’s best of the Best award last year. The building, comprisingoffices, including The Guardian newspaper’s new offices, a concert hall, an art exhibition space and restaurants, was honoured for its ‘excellence in architecture, clarity of purpose’ and its ability to lift the spirits of those who work there.
So has all his hard work paid off? ‘Well, when I joined in 1999 we had about 585 members and we’ve got about 1,500 now, so it’s about trebled over 10 years,’ he says. ‘The biggest test of any member organisation is whether people actually want to belong to it, and happily people do.’
The BCO is ‘a very broad church’, says Kauntze, but as you might expect, most of its members are large companies. ‘We have the big owners, investors and developers, an increasing number of major occupiers and that’s a very important target for us because they’re the ultimate customers of the office.
‘But we also have the whole of the design and cartography industry – architects, engineers lawyers, accountants, contractors, as well as other niche practices. There’s no special treatment, though. What makes us unusual is that all of our members are exactly equal,’ says Kauntze.
So why should businesses join the BCO? ‘There are all sorts of tangible benefits that you’d expect from a membership organisation, such as networking, access to research, access to events and so on and so forth, but I think what sits above all of that, and I think is more interesting, is the chance to influence debate because we bring all these people together on an equal basis. That gives our members a unique opportunity to create a better product.’
And how important are designers in getting an office right? ‘It’s enormously important, because it’s the designers who can interpret what the people who work in a particular office want,’ he says. ‘The principles of good design and the relationship between the physical environment and the people who work in it apply just as much to a business with 10 people as to one with 50,000. But you don’t need to spend a huge amount of money; you just need to think about it.’
This article was first published in FX Magazine.
