Wedged between what was once the site of a Portland locomotive foundry and the ultra-modern headquarters of Wex Inc., the Maine offices of Sun Life U.S. are another sign that change has come to the city’s eastern waterfront.

Sun Life is opening a 77,000-square-foot Portland office Tuesday, accommodating the company’s 525 employees from southern Maine and northern New Hampshire in a new four-story building at 110 Thames St.

The space, in three stories of the new four-story complex, is designed to ultimately provide workspace for 860 workers. A company spokesperson said the build-out for Sun Life’s space will cost about $24 million.

Sun Life U.S. is the American subsidiary of Toronto-based employee benefits and financial firm Sun Life Inc., which has had offices in South Portland and Scarborough for eight years. In 2015, Sun Life acquired Assurant Inc.’s disability risk management subsidiary, renamed FullscopeRMS, expanding its presence in the Maine insurance industry.

The company announced the move to the Portland waterfront property in 2019.

“There are more people working in disability insurance in the Portland area than anywhere else in the world,” Sun Life U.S. President Dan Fishbein said in an interview with the Press Herald on Monday. “We hope that over a period of time, we will continue to grow the number of people here and are certainly making this a key place where we hire.”

The building is part of the planned Portland Foreside complex, a commercial and residential reinvention of the old Portland Co. complex and eastern waterfront. The Sun Life U.S. building itself will incorporate retail spaces on the first floor.

Already, the complex is doing business. A high-end eatery, Twelve, opened last year across the street.

“It’s great to be part of a mixed-use development. It’s not an office park. It’s not by a highway. There are people around all the time,” Fishbein said. “Over time, it’s going to be fun to watch this location come back to life.”

 

Plans were conceived before the COVID-19 pandemic, which dramatically changed the approach to designing the office space. Since 2020, Sun Life U.S. reevaluated all its office spaces nationwide, reducing total building square footage by roughly 50% and incorporating more free-roaming areas without assigned workspaces.

Sun Life U.S. allows employees to do self-selective hybrid work, and encourages employees to utilize the office when they can. Since its soft opening a few weeks ago, an estimated 20% of the commuting-distance employees have used the space at least once per week.

“There’s all different types of work going on here, and it comes down to the different neighborhoods we have created. We have different types of space for different types of work,” Fishbein said.

The office space exemplifies a shift to more communal-style work environments, with lounge spaces steps away from more traditional cubical-style workspaces or even treadmill desks. The diversity in workstations and amenities, like a full kitchen, yoga studio and showers, is another aspect of encouraging a return to in-person work, he said.

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