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Kforce Inc., the publicly traded Tampa technology staffing company, has opened its new corporate headquarters, a 22,232-square-foot hybrid workspace for employees to duck in and out of whenever they want, or need, to be in the office.
The space is on the fifth floor of the Midtown West tower in the Midtown Tampa development and is considered by the company to be at the forefront of how people will work moving forward.
“We led from the front to figure out how the internet was going to impact our business. Now we’re leading from the front on how these changes we all experienced throughout the pandemic are going to change where and how work is performed,” says Joe Liberatore, Kforce’s president and CEO.
Liberatore spoke Nov. 1 at the ribbon-cutting for the company’s new headquarters, a modern workplace where rows of desks, shared spaces, quiet rooms, a cafe and executive offices combine to give a sense of normalcy without quiet living up to the impression. You see, while all the accouterments of daily office living are there, including the warm color palates and amenities, this is not the kind of workspace most people of have grown up with.
The biggest difference is that the space, despite the look, is not for regular daily office use. It is for employees to drop by for meetings, for training, to meet clients and to get a little bit of work done before going back to their regular workspace, be it a kitchen table, converted master bedroom closet or Minnesota.
The idea is all based on the company’s hybrid work model, progressive even when compared with what other businesses embracing the model do. There are no mandatory office days and employees are not required to spend time in the office. All the work an employee must do can be done remotely.
“Cubicles and 9-5 work schedules were replaced with collaboration and team zones, hotel desks, state-of-the-art technology and schedules that prioritize flexibility and excellence,” the company says. Employees can come in to work for as long or as little as they like, moving from zone to zone depending on their needs and requirements.
Kforce employs more than 2,000 people in 30 “reimagined” offices nationwide, including about 600 in Tampa. No one is required to come into the office.
The new headquarters is far cry from its previous space, a 130,000-square-foot office building in Ybor City.
Kforce, like much of the world, switched to remote work in March 2020 because of the pandemic. A little more than a year later, in April 2021, the company announced it had sold the Ybor City campus it occupied since 2001 in an effort to find a smaller headquarters. Even before COVID-19 struck, it had only been utilizing about 50% of its space.
Several months later, in September, it announced that it would move the headquarters to Midtown Tampa and leased the office back until the move.
A major part of the decision was embracing the hybrid work model to, as Liberatore said at the time, build “a culture of flexibility and choice empowered by trust and technology.”
“It just made sense because we knew that we could operate in less space,” Liberatore says now. “And then we were also hearing from our people that they really wanted complete flexibility. They didn’t want to be forced back in.”
And even if the company decided to force employees back in, it would be tough. Kforce employs 600 people in the Tampa office and only about 100 can work in the space at one time.
The new office space wasn’t the only news coming from Kforce Nov. 1. The company also reported its third quarter revenue jumped 8.7% year over year to $437.6 million.
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