Spark Auckland finds its home of tomorrow at Fifty Albert Street

In early 2025 Spark will be moving its Auckland headquarters to Fifty Albert Street – a purpose-built, next generation development that will be specifically designed to support an innovation culture, future ways of working, wellbeing, and sustainability.

One of Spark’s strategic ambitions for FY24-26 is to build an Innovation Culture characterized by advanced talent and skill development, inclusive progression, leading people experiences, and safe and healthy working environments with flexible ways of working.

At the same time, like many major organisations in Aotearoa, Spark is navigating a fundamental shift in the way people work, learn, and connect following COVID-19, with Spark’s Auckland teams now utilising hybrid ways of working.

As a result, Spark has decided to relocate and design a working environment that supports its strategic goals and new ways of working, while leveraging its digital capabilities to seamlessly connect the virtual and physical worlds to enable more effective collaboration among its teams.

Heather Polglase, People and Culture Director at Spark said “Our current offices have our teams separated across multiple towers, and some of our Spark people are based at another building altogether. Staying put would require an extensive redesign of our buildings to support our ambitions and make them fit for purpose both today and tomorrow, whereas moving somewhere new gives us the opportunity to design our working environments alongside our people from the start.“

Our people have told us they value an office environment that promotes collaboration and connection, and our new site will have this in spades. It will also be the first site in Aotearoa to achieve a platinum WELL certification for the whole building, which measures building factors that impact human health and wellbeing such as air and water quality, access to adequate lighting, comfort, and noise levels.“

Over the next few months, we will be co-designing our new spaces with our people, to ensure we offer our teams unrivalled experiences at work that support them to achieve, to progress, and to work flexibly with high levels of wellbeing.”

Fifty Albert Street has been designed specifically to meet the needs of Spark’s people, including dedicated spaces for focused work and areas for collaboration and socialisation that will support Spark’s Agile ways of working. There’s a mixture of indoor and outdoor spaces and a restorative area for activities such as meditation, yoga, or prayer. It will also include all-gender bathrooms and a dedicated space for parents, aligning with Spark's Whakapuāwai kaupapa – its new parental leave package that supports parents as they transition back to work.

When seeking out a new property, Spark was committed to finding a space that aligned with its sustainability goals. The Fifty Albert Street build and fit-out have been rated world-leading with a six for Green Star and a market leading five stars for NABERS1, which assesses energy performance.All of Spark’s people currently located at 167 Victoria Street West will move to Fifty Albert, along with most of its people based at Mayoral Drive. Spark will occupy six of the 12-story building’s floors.

1 National Australian Build Environment Rating System