Hang-Ten Atmosphere Aims to Get Staff Stoked

Recruiting and retaining talented Generation X employees is easier if your office looks more like a clubhouse then a club room.

Just ask Alexandra Rand, chief executive of Marina del Rey-based Internal & External Communication Inc. Rand recently renovated the company’s offices in an attempt to invigorate its young work force, which designs interactive training CD-ROMs.

“We wanted something that was comfortable and something that would inspire people to brainstorm,” Rand said. On the other hand, she didn’t want an environment so funky it would make such conservative clients as Lexus and Federal Express feel “like they were at a party they weren’t dressed right for.”

So the company adopted a Southern California beach theme, a concept Rand and other executives felt its customers from across the country could connect with. In the lobby, a surfboard is propped against one wall. Beneath it, a channel of sand runs along the baseboards and a blue wave of drywall curls around the reception desk.

Contemporary couches and tables are placed along office hallways for employees to hold impromptu meetings and for the firm’s three recruiters to conduct informal job interviews, Creative Director Glenn Yee said. In the last five years, the company has grown from 14 employees to 160.

Other themes were used to simplify the administrative operations of the office. A brightly colored street sign, with an employee’s first name and phone extension, dangles above each cubicle. The signs help employees find one another as they move from project to project and work space to work space, Yee said. Only the president has a private office.

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The seven conference rooms lining the halls are named for Southern California’s beaches, running north from Del Mar to Zuma, so when a meeting is called, bosses can tell their staff to “head to Laguna”--rather than “the large conference room.” And each of the laser printers has a whimsical name taken from the employee who sits next to it, like “Shady Glenn” or “Pottery Barn.”

To coax employees to work together, executives encourage them to play together.

A foosball table is crammed into one large kitchen. A table for 10 sits in the other to help accommodate weekly staff luncheons. (Kitchen cleanup detail is also assigned in teams.) Employees hang out together at planned roller-blading sessions, movie nights and on company ski trips.

“We want it to be a fun, exciting experience,” Rand said.