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15
Flexible Working
Flexible working means many things
to many people. Often it means a big
investment in new technology and eye-
catching interior designs. But it doesn’t
have to come with a blank cheque. Take
Vodafone’s Connect HQ in Newbury. Yes,
it cost a lot to implement – there was
a buildings budget of £1 million – but
some of these costs have been offset by
savings directly related to new ways of
working, such as hot desking, paper-less
working and a clean desk policy.
Vodafone has calculated that the
lifetime cost of every page printed, when
you take into account toner, paper, storage
and disposal costs, is 13.2p and that since
adopting flexible working it has reduced
paper consumption from 30 million to 6.5
million printed sheets. You do the maths.
Other savings come from quicker and
easier office moves, which are claimed to
save Vodafone £3 million a year.
The Vodafone experience also shows
that you don’t need to employ the
services of an expensive design company
or buy beautiful furniture to make
flexible working work. Vodafone re-used
existing desks and seating, and when new
furnishings were needed, for example
in the informal meeting rooms, it found
what it needed at IKEA and DFS. The result
is incoherent from a design perspective –
and shabby in parts – but functional and
comfortable.
Nor is flexible working only for large
businesses – start-ups and small businesses
often work this way by default and there is
nothing to stop medium-sized businesses
from changing the way they work. The
Vodafone Better Ways of Working division
advises businesses of all sizes and doesn’t
prescribe a template for customers to
follow: about one in five clients opts for a
full transformation, with others choosing
more limited changes.
Background
Better Ways of Working is not the first
business transformation exercise carried
out by the mobile telecommunications
company, which was founded above a curry
shop in Newbury 25 years ago. In 2003,
Vodafone consolidated 64 offices in and
around Newbury and moved to a purpose-
built campus on the outskirts of town. This
housed 3,000 employees in seven new
buildings, but working practices were the
same: every employee had a desk and a
printer and every manager had an office.
In 2006/2007, a number of factors
prompted Vodafone to look at remote
working: continued growth meant the
campus was running out of space; and
in 2007 a severe flood caused it to shut
Wireless and fancy free
In 2007, a severe flood closed Vodafone’s Newbury campus for three days
and forced the company to look at flexible working strategies.
These have now been deployed across the company and are such a success
that Vodafone has set up a consultancy division to advise customers on
implementing Better Ways of Working. James Goulding took a tour of the
Vodafone campus to find out more
for three days. Vodafone set up Project
Tardis with the intention of introducing
hot desking and remote working. It didn’t
work. Because the process was voluntary,
just one in five employees elected to
give up their own space and there was
little buy-in from those at the top. As
Frances Quigg, head of the Better Ways
of Working division, says: “It was hard to
convince managers to give up their office
and their printer.”
A failure, then, but not a waste of
time, as Vodafone learnt two valuable
lessons from the experience: business
transformation exercises only work if they
are mandatory; and they must apply to
everyone in an organisation, from senior
management down.
The value of these lessons became
apparent in 2008 and 2009, when a
new CEO was employed to turn around
the declining fortunes of Vodafone UK,
which had had four CEOs in two years,
laid off staff and fallen to seventh place,
out of nine, in the ranking of Vodafone’s
European operating companies.
New CEO Guy Knowles had previously
worked in the Netherlands where he
had turned around the company and
introduced new ways of working, albeit
on a much smaller scale – for 300 to 400
people compared to 3,400 people in the
UK.
“He came in and introduced Better
Ways of Working,” explains Quigg. “He
physically changed the environment and
changed processes so a lot are now done
online, such as expenses, HR, holiday
approvals; he drove out a paper-based,
meetings-based culture; and he changed
the mindset of leaders because in most
companies culture comes from the top
down.”
A definition
So what does Better Ways of Working
involve? Quigg offers a succinct definition
– and a clarification: “The idea is that you
can work where you want, wherever is
most appropriate for you to do your job –
it could be at a client site, on campus or at
home,” she says.
“For us flexible working does not mean
home working, as 20% of a company’s
workforce might not have a home
environment where they can work. For
example, they might have young children
or share a flat.”
... since
adopting
flexible
working it
has reduced
paper
consumption
from 30
million to
6.5 million
printed
sheets.
Continued...
