INNOVATION PROFILE VodafoneA new office layout is part of a deliberate effort to make the company a better place to work
The first things that strike you when you walk through the Vodafone headquarters in the south Dublin suburb of Leopardstown is the amount of light, colour and noise about.
What few partitions exist tend to be made of glass and this combines with the glass frontage of the building to make natural light a pervasive influence. The warm red of the Vodafone livery reinforces the sense of colour and lightness.
Then there is the noise – but it’s not the machine noise of hard disks whirring or air-conditioning systems you might expect from a building which houses 1,000 staff.
The dominant sound is conversation between the people who work there. After that you start to notice other things which are quite unexpected in a corporate HQ.
The first is the almost complete absence of offices. Not even the chief executive has one. The second is the layout of the desks which are arranged at angles to each other rather than in the serried ranks favoured by office managers almost since time immemorial.
The absence of paper around the place is another feature which strikes you and, as you explore further, you find a distinct lack of meeting rooms and no leather seated boardroom either.
If you had time to count them all you would find an apparent insufficiency of desks, there’s only about 700 of them for the 1,000 staff that use them.
These unusual design features and shortage of desks are all part of a deliberate effort on the part of Vodafone to make the company a better place to work, according to HR director Rachel Mooney.
Traditional lines
“About two years ago, we decided to shake up how we get our work done here at Vodafone. In the space where we operate as a company, there is a need to be innovative, creative and agile and we found that the old traditional way we were organised here was not very good for that.”
The old way of working had the company organised and segmented on traditional lines and the offices reflected that.
“We weren’t very good at communicating internally,” Mooney says. “People needed to speak to each other more but we were quite siloed organisationally with the quite poor communications between the different teams. This tended to hold back new ideas and creativity and we decided to design a working environment that would encourage communications and allow people to be more creative.”
This started with all of the individual offices being taken away and lots of the meeting rooms being removed as well.
“We also removed any territories that people could take ownership of, so the storage units that used to create solid corridors were all taken away.”
Of course, you can’t simply remove all traditional forms of business organisation. “People need to work and have their jobs to do in areas such as marketing or finance or HR,” she points out.
“But instead of segregated departments we now have neighbourhoods and within these neighbourhoods nobody has a specific desk. You can be working beside different people every day of the week or even at different times of the same day. People have their laptop, their phone and a small locker to keep belongings and so on in.
“The wireless network means that people can work from anywhere in the building at any time they wish. Also, they can work from home or from a customer site or anywhere else. We don’t mind so long as they’re getting the work done.”
This explains the absence of desks.
Paper has almost been eliminated.
“We do have a few printers but they are kind of difficult to find so that reduces paper,” Mooney says. “We have also cut down an awful lot on meetings. A whole industry grows up around meetings in terms of preparing for them.
“We have cut a lot of this out – we don’t possess a projector for PowerPoint presentations, for example. People now get together much more informally a lot of the time and this is much faster and more efficient.”
This however has been far more than just a furniture change. “We worked with all of the management team and the staff on it. We very much wanted to create a sense of community and we put a mock-up of the plans on one floor and encouraged everyone to give us their views.”
Enhanced performance
The payback she says has been rapid in both cost savings and business performance. “The cost of all the changes was quite high but it has already been repaid due to the reduced amount of space we now occupy. This allowed us to sub-let a portion of the building.
“It has also enhanced our performance in dealing with our customers. The stuff we sell to customers in terms of mobile working and so on is quite leading edge and advanced and is about new ways of working.
“It really is necessary for us to believe in it ourselves if we are to sell it successfully. Having it in operation here where we have a short feedback loop to determine what works and what doesn’t has been a real help in that regard.”
The transformation in the working environment has had other more intangible but measurable benefits as well.
“We carry out regular surveys among our employees to find out how they feel about the company and so on. Since we started the change process, there has been a huge increase in the numbers who would recommend Vodafone products and services to their family and friends. That is probably one of the best success indicators we could have.”
