Please Remove Your Shoes Before Entering This San Francisco Headquarters

Gusto, a San Francisco company that helps small businesses manage payroll, benefits and human resources, recently moved to Pier 70, a cavernous space that once housed the Union Iron Works machine shop. Industrial and immense (55,000-square-feet), the company leaders sought solutions to make the office more comfortable for its employees. And that included a no shoes policy.

“We want our office to feel like a home, to be comfortable and authentic,” said Josh Reeves, CEO and co-founder of Gusto, in a story for the San Francisco Chronicle. “We started Gusto in a house in Palo Alto and had a no-shoe policy there, and we all grew up in shoeless houses.”

The home theme is carried out in the cavernous central space, which ‘gusties’ refer to as a living room, albeit one appropriate for a giant. Groupings of couches, easy chairs and coffee tables alternate with rows of workbenches. Overhead loom the old gantry cranes complete with driver cabs, and a complex crisscross of pipes and beams, while huge arched windows bring in natural light.”

You can see more pictures of this clever transformation here.