West Bend Mutual Insurance Co. employees recently moved into the 214,000-square-foot building addition that doubled the size of the company’s corporate headquarters at 1900 S. 18th Ave., West Bend. The expansion includes a massive, 14,600-square-foot dinging area (with a 42-foot ceiling), a 7,100-square-foot fitness center, a 25,000-square-foot training center and a 400-space parking structure.
The company has about 800 employees that work at the corporate headquarters, which was originally built in 1991. "The problem with this building was, with 800 people, we didn’t have enough cafeteria (space, we didn’t have enough training rooms, the auditorium was too small, we didn’t have enough bathrooms," said president and chief operating officer Kevin Steiner. The expanded facility should provide enough space for eight to 15 years, he said.
"We certainly will have more people that will work in the field and remotely," Steiner said. "If we didn’t have that we could fill this building in a matter of five to eight years. But because we have a strategy, with respect to remote workers, that’s going to relieve some of the pressure on when the next expansion comes. We set the building up and we overbuilt a bit on cafeteria and meeting space so when the time comes all we do is we put a wing (onto the cafeteria). We’ve made sure to build this building to just put on a wing of workspace and we’ll have enough infrastructure to be able to support that."
