Legrand’s West Hartford Headquarters Earns Prestigious LEED Green Building Certification

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Ronni Newton

June 28, 2018

5 min. read

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Legrand North and Central America, which is headquartered in West Hartford, recently celebrated being awarded LEED Green Building Certification.

Legrand North and Central America learned last month that the company’s West Hartford corporate headquarters – a campus of five connected buildings, one of which is about 100 years old – had earned the prestigious LEED Certification.

“As a global company, we’ve been committed for a long time to protecting the environment,” John Selldorff, president and CEO of Legrand North and Central America, told staff and invited guests at a celebration held at the headquarters last week.

Legrand used Arc, a digital performance platform that helps benchmark, measure and improve sustainability performance, to utilize actual building performance data to achieve points toward LEED Certification. Included are statistics for energy, waste, water, human experience, and transportation data, and a score is then tabulated which is compared to similar facilities.

Legrand earned 46 points from business performance plus two more for new lighting and sustainable cleaning. Forty points is the minimum for LEED Certified status.

“This is core to who we are, not just where we are,” Selldorff said. “It’s a demonstration of what is possible … I hope it will be an inspiration to others.”

Most facilities that become LEED Certified are new, but Legrand’s five interconnected, mixed-use office and manufacturing space includes a variety of construction, including a nearly 47,000 square foot structure built in 1929.

The overall facility totals 262,690 square feet, and employs nearly 650 people. Selldorff thanked all of the employees for their efforts in improving the day-to-day sustainability of the buildings.

Work to become LEED certified was done without downtime, giving the company firsthand experience in the challenges of retrofitting existing buildings. As a “global specialist in electrical and digital building infrastructures” committed to providing “better form, better function and better experiences,” Selldorff said that what the company accomplished indicated that when it comes to sustainability, “We actually walk that walk.”

Becoming LEED Certified was just one more way the company demonstrated its CSR – “corporate social responsibility,” said Legrand CEO Benoit Coquart. “It’s a matter of pride for us, and I hope we will have many more buildings become LEED certified,” Coquart said.

Susan Rochford, vice president for Energy Efficiency, Sustainability and Public Policy, Legrand North and Central America, leads the CSR efforts at the headquarters, and explained that the LEED score is dynamic. The company achieved LEED Certified status with a score of 48, but the goal is to continue to increase that, eventually gaining “silver” status (50-59 points) or even beyond.

Ravi Ramanathan, vice president and general manager, Electrical Wiring Systems, Legrand North and Central America, praised Legrand’s employees for their support of the LEED Certification process. “Our employees on this site really make it happen by paying attention to small things,” he said.

Turning things off when they’re not in use, and even riding their bikes to work, help improve the score, Ramanathan said. Other contributors include a transition to using green cleaning products, changing the air flow through the site, and moving all smoking areas to at least 25 feet from the buildings. All made a difference.

Legrand has also reconfigured spaces to incorporate more natural light, changed over all plant lighting to LED, committed to purchasing furniture made from recycled materials, and reduced its carbon footprint cutting energy consumption by more than 10 percent through installation of a fuel cell – changes which all are incorporated into earning the LEED Certification.

By 2022, Ramanathan said, the target is to reduce water and energy usage by 25 percent.

“We’re achieving all this in a 100-year-old facility. I think this is a big deal,” Ramanathan said.

“We’re not done,” Selldorff said. “If we think we’re finished, we’re not living up to our expectations. We ‘only’ got 48 points out of 100. There’s another 52 to get.”

As he gave invited guests a tour of the building, Plant Manager Mike Kijak pointed out the variety of sustainable building policies that were at the core of achieving LEED Certification. Every building on the campus has its own recycling center, he said.

“We use about 11 million pounds of steel per year, and we recycle about 99 percent of what we get rid of,” Kijak said.

The paint line, which uses 2 million gallons of water per year, has also been a target for energy savings. Even employees’ commutes are a factor in calculating LEED Certification. The average commute s 11.6 mikes, Kijak said, and many employees use public transportation, including CTfastrak which runs right behind Legrand’s headquarters.

Legrand’s fuel cell, installed about two years ago, provides enough energy so that the company can be “off the grid” at all times other than from 5 a.m.-1 p.m. Monday through Friday.

According to a news release from Legrand, “The LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) rating system, developed by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), is the foremost program for buildings, homes, and communities that seek to design, construct, maintain and operate for improved environmental and human health performance. More than 92,000 commercial and institutional projects are currently participating in LEED, comprising more than 19.3 billion square feet of construction space in all 50 states and more than 167 countries and territories.”

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How Graphic Design Enhances the Workplace Experience

Ryan Thorp

 Aug 19, 2022

5 min. read

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As a Senior Graphic Designer at HqO, I know that design is integral to the workplace experience. I also know that many people don’t understand the important role that design plays in the workplace.

And why would they? Good design is meant to be seamless. When it succeeds, it becomes invisible to employees by integrating itself into the fabric of daily life. It is something that we all constantly experience, without even realizing it.

For example: consider some of the most successful office products, like the rolling chair or the standing desk. Both of these items have been painstakingly engineered by designers, but they usually function so well that we, the users, barely notice that they’ve been designed at all. And that’s intentional. In fact, it’s because they work the way that they’re supposed to.

I mean, when do you consciously think about your office chair? 

You might think about its design when you first use it — is it ergonomic? adjustable? comfortable? — but, if you’re like me, you probably don’t think about it much after that. 

Unless, of course, it’s hurting your back.

At HqO, we understand the importance of good design, and we use that understanding to engineer a seamless workplace experience for all of our customers. But we also know that the importance of design in the workplace isn’t always obvious to everyone. With that in mind, I’ll walk you through a few of the ways that innovative companies can use design and graphic design to improve their workplace environments. 

Branding the Office

One of the ways that HqO uses graphic design to improve the workplace experience is by strongly linking our brand to our physical offices.

The 14th floor entrance to our Boston headquarters, for example, features a large mural of the skyline that surrounds our offices. The placement of this mural (original work by a local artist) might not seem intentional, but it’s actually part of a broader strategy to connect our culture to our place of work. In addition to the entryway mural, our office also features a substantial amount of branded material (coffee cups, glasses, etc.) and artwork (pictures, wall-mounted brand images, etc.) that reflects the spirit of our brand and celebrates our customers. One of our conference rooms, for example, contains a second mural, which features depictions of buildings where our app is currently active. By filling the office with imagery that reinforces and reflects the HqO brand, we create a space that’s both welcoming and HqO-specific. 

In general, incorporating your company’s branding into the visual layout of the office can help you communicate your company’s culture and values to everyone who walks through the door. For clients and visitors, these visual cues function as positive advertisements for your company, and further reinforce the value that your brand represents. For employees, a branded space contributes to a stronger sense of place, which can make them happier and more productive.

A well-branded office space improves the workplace experience by positively influencing how employees and visitors feel about the workplace. That’s why the design team at HqO has really gone out of its way to make sure that our offices are warm, welcoming, and distinctive.

This is also something that we help our customers achieve: because our app is white-labeled, it allows employers and landlords to promote their own distinct brand identity, rather than HqO’s. 

Branding the Company

In the past, when most workers were coming into the office every day, corporate cultures were closely tied to in-person, in-office events and experiences. But now, in the age of hybrid work, most employees aren’t coming into their company’s offices on a daily basis. This means that many employers now have to find new ways of communicating their corporate cultures that aren’t necessarily tied to a physical building. 

Here’s how we accomplish this at HqO: we extend our culture beyond our physical offices by integrating our branding into local events, digital workspaces, and other workplace tools. One of the ways we’re able to accomplish this effectively is by maintaining (and adhering to) a detailed style guide. A style guide is important for any company because it provides basic stipulations that detail how your company’s brand is supposed to look, sound, and feel. We make a deliberate effort to stick to these guidelines in case studies, eBooks, event branding, and many other written and visual materials. All of this helps us maintain a consistent brand voice that reinforces our company’s identity, and, by extension, the value that the name and brand “HqO” represents. 

Think about it: the world’s most popular and widely-known companies use brand images to evoke specific, instantaneous responses in the viewer. Obviously, these companies use the strength of their brand images to appeal to consumers, but they also use the strength of their brand images to create office spaces that match their company’s culture.

A healthy brand, in other words, helps reinforce a particular sense of place in the workplace. In order to effectively brand your places, your company’s brand image should be recognizable in any medium.

Branding the Product

While they’re usually not a part of my day-to-day responsibilities, user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design are also important aspects of the workplace experience (this applies to our product: the HqO Workplace Experience Platform). 

Design, at the highest level, is a way to solve problems creatively. Together, UX and UI design apply this principle to human-computer interaction by ensuring that the user’s experience with technology is as painless as possible. Good UX/UI design, in other words, eliminates confusion for the user when they use technology. But that’s not all that UX and UI designers do. 

Ultimately, the shared goal of both disciplines is to create digital interfaces that are accessible to all people in society — not just the healthy and able-bodied. This means that UX and UI designers are responsible for addressing a wide range of accessibility issues. Because the products they create have to meet the needs of every potential user, UX and UI designers have to ensure that their designs are accessible to people with visual impairments, people with mobility impairments, and people with other forms of disability. 

Accessibility in design is critical. It’s also something that’s important to me on a personal level. A large part of my Master’s thesis was about the 1968 Mexico Olympics — a landmark event in the history of accessible design. The designers at those Olympics were actually some of the first to use a set of symbols, icons, and pictographs without the use of supporting text to explain the meaning of the image. My thesis used these Olympics as a case study to affirm the importance of this kind of word-free signage, while also highlighting the fact that accessible design practices are often overlooked by institutions and companies. 

But HqO isn’t one of those companies. We have a terrific, empathetic design team that works constantly to improve the accessibility of our product, which is one of the reasons why I’m proud to work here.

Looking to the Future

The future of work has changed rapidly in the last few years, and the same is true of the technology that supports the workplace. These days, in the face of growing market uncertainty, it can be hard for businesses to see what’s coming next. It feels like we’ve entered a period of history where uncertainty and change are two of the only constants. But even if the current pace of change feels rapid, there are still ways that companies can prepare themselves for long-term success. Smart design choices are one such tactic: they help companies, institutions, and individuals achieve their business goals by simplifying complex problems. 

At HqO, we use design thinking to help companies and landlords improve their workplace experience. Our team’s extensive background in both graphic and UX/UI design allows us to offer our customers a well-branded and streamlined user experience, all within an attractive digital interface. The successful design of our product contributes to the success of our company — it’s one of the reasons why we were recently listed near the top of Inc.’s list of the 5000 fastest-growing private companies in America. It’s also one of the reasons why I know the work I do is so important. As a designer, you always want to work with people who value good design. And that’s exactly how we operate at HqO. 

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