magazine
16
Flexible Working
People are
encouraged
to take their
laptops to
meetings
and are
discouraged
from printing
anything.
...continued
This sounds simple, but Quigg says it
was still difficult to get people on board,
even though they no longer had a choice
in the matter.
“There were people who didn’t want
to do it. About 13 managers left the
company because they weren’t happy.
Most of us – and I was one of them –
thought this’ll never work, but I wouldn’t
go back to how we used to work. I used
to have a desk, a printer and three storage
cabinets. I don’t have any of that now: my
office is my laptop case and my mobile
phone and my tablet when I need one.
I can work here, I can work in Paddington.
Wherever I need to work I can, because I
am connected all the time.
“We have gone from managing
by attendance to managing through
deliverables. You are not judged by how
long you are in the office. Instead, we
each have six sets of objectives that
are regularly reviewed during the year.
Through that, we have seen a massive
increase in employee satisfaction.”
Now, nobody, not even the CEO, owns
a desk or a private office. Instead, each
employee is assigned to a Home Zone – a
specific area of a building – where they
can work at shared tables, which they
must clear at the end of the day. Each
Home Zone has a magnetic whiteboard
where the names and photos of its
members are displayed.
Each of the seven Vodafone offices has
an atrium with communal spaces, such as
break-out areas and coffee shops, where
employees can relax or collaborate with
colleagues and hold internal meetings.
“We have white noise throughout the
campus so you can be sitting quite near
a conversation and hear that they are
talking but not actually hear what they
are saying,” explains Quigg.
There are also project areas
with whiteboards and collaboration
technologies for longer term occupation.
“For the launch of 4G or the iPhone, we
might get together a project team and
they may well be in one area of the office
for 5 days a week for X number of months.
But at the end of X months, they go back
to their home zones,” explains Quigg.
There are also Huddle rooms, for quick
impromptu chats; three libraries for quiet
work – “the most under-utilised places on
campus,” according to Quigg; and a choice
of meeting rooms where the managers’
offices used to be. These are allocated
using an electronic booking system, which
Quigg says has resulted in very high
occupancy rates.
“Our meeting room utilisation rate is
very high at 80-85%, compared to 35-
45% in other organisations we see.With
our meeting room system, if you don’t
turn up you are cleared down, which is
how we have achieved such high levels of
utilisation,” Quigg explains.
Employees change Home Zones every
two years, but because they now have
such a small footprint, the cost of moves
has fallen from £150 to £15 per person.
Paper-less working
Employees’ light footprint is partly a
product of using laptops and smartphones
instead of PCs and deskphones (only the
internal and external communications
teams have fixed line phones, so they
can communicate even if the Vodafone
network has shut down); and partly
a consequence of Vodafone’s digital
working culture, which has reduced paper
consumption and minimised the need for
filing cabinets.What filing cabinets there
are have slanted tops to prevent paper
from being left on top.
“We have gone from paper handouts
to digital views on laptops and tablets.
People are encouraged to take their
laptops to meetings and are discouraged
from printing anything.We now have one
printer for every 125 people,” says Quigg.
There are no desktop printers and just
two MFPs in a business centre on every
floor. These have Follow Me printing so
you can send a print to any printer on the
campus and pull it down when you are
at the machine. Every month, Vodafone
emails the 10 people who have printed
the most and asks what they are doing to
generate so much paper.
“What we find,” says Quigg, “is that
the people who print most are not
normally Vodafone employees.We have
a lot of contractors on-site who will print
out things like timesheets. And there are
several departments that will print more.
Our bid management teams will always
be heavy printers. A lot of our customers
want paper copies of things, particularly
in the public sector, so you will never
eradicate paper completely.We do keep
some archive material, because certain
things are mandated, which we store off
site. But most of our stuff is now scanned,
including the post.”
A journey
Implementing Better Ways of Working
has had significant benefits for Vodafone.
Productivity has increased by 20%,
and the use of shared desks, which are
occupied for 50% of the time, combined
with working off-site and at home, has
enabled Vodafone to accommodate a
workforce of 5,500 on a campus that once
had room for only 3,400 employees.
Quigg says the use of video-
conferencing on laptops and Microsoft
Lync has saved £40.7 million in travel
costs over five years. “Our sales people can
spend more time with customers, which
is where they should be, and less time
travelling to Newbury to pick things up.”
However, there are still aspects that
could be improved. Quigg says that email
is still used too much; there is a need
for dedicated video and audio pods for
one-to-one communication; and meeting
rooms are too big.“Studies show that
most meetings are for 2 or 3 people, but
traditional meeting rooms are designed
for 6 or 7 people. Originally, we just
changed managers’ offices into meeting
rooms, but in the next phase we plan to
divide some of these in half to create
more meeting rooms that better reflect
people’s meeting habits.”
Quigg says change management is an
on-going process, with a continual need
to induct new recruits into the culture.
“What we find,” she says, “is that people
who haven’t worked this way hear about
it and they can’t visualise how people
work in such a way. Then, when they come
here and see people working, they realise
it is not something to be scared of.”
Quigg’s Top Tips
1. Sponsorship has to come from the top.
2. Enforce simple rules e.g. clear desk policies.
3. Consistency is critical – make things the same for
everyone.
4. Meet resistance head on – you will get people who
are afraid or reluctant to change
5. Mobilisation is essential. Untether people from
their desks and get them to use the whole space.
6. Think about your people – how to get them on
board and the processes they follow that make
them behave in a certain way.
7. Consider the impact of space on behaviour.
8. Technology is the enabler.
9. You have to invest to save.
10. Be brave, don’t hold back.
