Best Practices Award: Bank of America: Real Estate Workplace

When BankAmerica decided to drive down construction costs and give its business units a leg up on the competition, BAC?s corporate real estate group radically revamped its approach to designing work environments. The result: a set of award-winning, real estate workplace best practices

There?s a new mantra among the corporate real estate pros at BankAmerica Corp. (BAC) these days: integrate, integrate, integrate. It?s not that location strategy has been tossed by the wayside, but for the time being, an integrated approach to designing work environments is top of mind at BAC?s real estate group. This new approach links corporate real estate strategists with human resource specialists and information technologists, as a crucial step in the complex process of designing efficient, flexible work environments and instituting construction techniques that drive down costs associated with ?churn? — the need to reconfigure work space. Along the way, BAC?s real estate group turned traditional workplace design inside out, and began thinking — from the outset of the process — about the business requirements of the workplace. ?Banking is changing dramatically,? says Karla Schikore, BAC?s senior vice president for corporate real estate. ?But the existing environment didn?t lend itself to change.?

Accordingly, Schikore?s real estate group began thinking about how to promote flexibility in BAC?s work environments to meet changing business objectives. They also moved to encourage employee interaction and facilitate communication, create an environment that distinguishes BAC as an ?employer of choice,? and provide cost-effective environments that support work processes.

Those multi-pronged goals helped nail BAC?s selection for the Workplace Best Practices Award by the International Development Research Council, explains workplace panel chair Ed Noha of Chicago-based LaSalle Partners. BAC?s strategy was designed to respond to business needs in a number of areas, ?to both influence cost and influence revenue,? Noha says.

$120 Million Goal

The program, still in the early stages of roll-out, has a long way to go before realizing savings of that magnitude. But it?s not too early to see the potential benefits of an integrated approach to design. Three examples of the workplace design integration process illustrate the huge rewards BAC expects to reap:

• Office environments will be designed to facilitate the work processes of employees located in that space and the appropriate new technologies supporting that work.
  
• To address the need to cut rising churn-associated construction costs, BAC plans to begin using a consistent approach worldwide to construction techniques.
  
• BAC beats its competition in the race for setting up branches inside grocery stories, and gets to be the ?first to market? when the construction of in-store branches uses a modular approach to design.
  

Rolling Out New Business

?Because we are able to get them up and operating seven-and-a-half weeks early,? Schikore says, BAC has a tremendous strategic competitive advantage. Hundreds of the in-store branches have been rolled out, as far away as Hong Kong.

In addition, the branch units were designed to be relocatable, a big plus when a retail location doesn?t pan out and BAC needs to move. Such flexibility is a necessary by-product of BAC?s inside-out, creative thinking: putting business needs and work processes ahead of office and space standards in designing work space.

— Audrey Pennington is an associate editor of Site Selection.