Putting the Organization on Wheels: Workplace Design at SEI

When a new employee joins SEI, it is an unusual experience. The new hire is given a map and sent down to a storeroom on the lower floor of the main building. There, the employee is issued a chair and desk, both on wheels, with a computer and phone on the desktop. The map shows where in the complex of nine barn-like buildings on the corporate campus in Oaks, Pennsylvania, the new hire will initially be located. The employee then rolls the desk through the buildings, into the oversized elevators designed for this purpose, past hallways filled with a provocative (and sometimes shocking) collection of emerging contemporary art.