Kenwood office owner using amenities to lure employees to the building

The owners of a Cincinnati office building are using amenities to lure employees back to the office.

Viking Partners, which owns and is headquartered in the more than 404,000-square-foot building located at 8044 Montgomery Road – formerly known as Towers of Kenwood, has added a fitness center that tenants and their employees can use free of charge. Officials said it has been a “huge success” thus far, expecting it to continue.

In addition to “state-of-the-art equipment,” Jenny Eversole, senior regional property manager at Viking, told me the firm also partnered with Anchor Wellness Center – a tenant in the building – to offer pop-up health classes like yoga, pilates, massage therapies, dance workshops and personal training sessions.

The fitness center currently has over 550 members, who are “working out there every day,” Eversole said.

Companies have had to adapt, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic, to meet the needs of employees to get them back in the office as a tight labor market has given workers the upper hand. According to Marissa Huber, workplace strategy director at Cushman & Wakefield, “nearly all industries are leveraging highly-amenitized buildings to attract and better serve the office-based workforce.”

The building’s amenities don’t stop at fitness. Eversole said Viking also added free Wifi to outdoor meeting and dining spaces, fresh food options to its cafe and began a once-a-week on-site seasonal farmer’s market.

Hannah Duckworth, manager of investor relations and marketing at Viking, said tenants are also “often looking to provide their employees with a beautiful space to work. Our intention with 8044 was to create a design-forward environment where people actually want to be.”

“I think the design of the fitness center speaks to that,” she said. “It’s very clean, very modern, lots of windows, lots of light. It really is a beautiful space.”

Eversole said in creating these amenities and programs, the firm started with and continuously held tenant forums to gather feedback on what they want in the building. It’s “been great to just get their feedback,” she said. “That way we can pivot on programs where the desire is not there.”

The firm also has found itself having to adapt to changing work schedules. The Business Courier reported in June many of downtown’s largest companies are implementing a hybrid return to office format. According to Gallup, 59% of people prefer to work a combination of in-person and online, while 9% of people said they wanted to work entirely on-site.

“We’re constantly evolving and changing our programs to make sure that we’re including all of those work schedules,” Eversole said.

Viking, which acquired the building in May 2019, started to develop an “enhanced wellness and amenities program for our tenants” in 2020 at the onset of Covid-19, Eversole said. The plan was to have the program in place before the tenants returned to the building.

Jeff Sluzala, director of asset management at the firm, said adding amenities “was something that we were looking at (before the pandemic), and the timing just worked out perfectly.”

“It’s been a hit since it started,” he said.