June 2, 2023
Geodis in Americas completed renovations to its Brentwood headquarters this spring, with cultivating culture at the forefront of its design.
Geodis moved into a 28,000-square-foot space at 7101 Executive Center Dr. in 2005. By fall of 2019, the logistics company occupied the whole building, 132,607 square feet, and began renovations.
The U.S. headquarters for Geodis, a worldwide supply chain logistics company, is located in Brentwood.
The renovations took seating from around 880 to over 1,000, including office, cube and collaborative space. Currently, around 600 people work from the headquarters on a hybrid schedule, at least three days a week in the office.
“It was very important to everyone to stay in Brentwood because it’s a very central location,” said Shannon Leffler, executive vice president of human resources at Geodis in Americas. “We wanted to have a place where people can come feel like they had a sense of belonging and be able to collaborate.”
The lobby of the three-story building features the front desk in front of a wall of greenery, a coffee and snack bar, kitchen, collaborative meeting spaces with a variety of seating — almost like cabanas — and an installation over the elevator shaft that acts as art and a noise muffler.
The second and third floor are similarly designed, with a variety of meeting spaces, focus rooms, offices and break rooms.
Throughout the building, Geodis emphasized sustainability, installing Bevi machines to eliminate plastic bottles, which saved over 32,000 bottles from being sent to landfills in 2022.
Geodis named its department areas with notable Nashville neighborhood names, like Edgehill. Offices are not assigned and employees can work outside of their “neighborhood.”
When planning its return-to-work policy, Geodis found that hybrid model was the best solution and wanted to give employees a sense of community coming out of a time of isolation during Covid-19.
“We have this mental health crisis in the U.S. and I think that during Covid-19 people were able to retreat. There was definitely a problem with loneliness and feeling that sense of belonging. In addition to the collaborative aspect of what we’re trying to do here, I think that for a lot of people, coming into the office can provide them with that sense of belonging,” Leffler said. “We’ve tried to develop our employee resource program, so we have Geodians owning our diversity, Geodians women’s network, we have emerging leaders, Geo-vet and Pride plus.”
As part of bringing employees together, they have been hosting monthly mixers in the Atrium, typically hosted by different employee resource groups or departments.“We are known for our culture. It’s a differentiator for us and we have a lot of engagement programming that we already have in place and the opportunities for collaboration are very exciting here,” Leffler said.
The design of the office was led by Nashville-based architecture and design firm Gresham Smith.
Geodis is one of Nashville’s largest employers, according to Business Journal research, with 2,325 local employees in 2022.
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