Accenture Treats New Ice Blocks Office Like A Coworking Space

Source: Sacramento Business Journal, Mark Anderson
Photo: An aerial view of midtown’s Ice Blocks project, where Accenture has a new office. (TODD QUAM, DIGITAL SKY AERIAL IMAGING)

Accenture’s new 10,000-square-foot office in midtown Sacramento’s Ice Blocks is meant to be an attraction to customers and employees of the consulting practice.

The consulting firm has had many offices over the years in Sacramento, all of them downtown, whereas the new location on the burgeoning R Street Corridor is seen as less stuffy and more attractive to recruit younger employees.

“It is a very cool space. The comments we get from our customers is that there is a lot of energy,” said Jens Egerland, Accenture’s Sacramento office lead. He described it as an open coworking space with remote communications technology to be able to conference in multiple locations at once.

The Accenture (NYSE: ACN) information technology consulting practice moved six weeks ago from 7,200 square feet of space in the Meridian Plaza office building downtown at 14th and L streets.

The previous location was an office, but Egerland calls the new place at 1610 R St. an “innovation space,” where multiple conference rooms allow for collaboration, and where three walls in the room and the tables are white boards for sketching out ideas.

Accenture’s Sacramento office has more than 500 employees assigned to it, but many of them actually work at state and local government agencies as technology consultants. Primarily, its employees work on large computer systems for a variety of agencies, but the company hopes to expand the Sacramento office to serve more corporate and health care clients, Egerland said.

The slick new office design in a hip new neighborhood is meant to attract the technology workers who are in great demand, Egerland said.

“Our goal is to be competitive with the Bay Area” for attracting talent, he said. “We are seeing that Sacramento is becoming a place where professionals would like to put down roots. We weren’t seeing that 10 or 20 years ago.”

While many Accenture employees work off-site, the new Ice Blocks office is where they can bring clients and prospects “to work on co-creating projects,” he said.

https://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/news/2019/06/24/accenture-treats-new-ice-blocks-office