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p until a few years ago,” says Frank Shepherd, “There were three ways of getting work done. Fixed offices took up 95 percent of the time, mobile work took up 3 percent or 4 percent and teleworking (permanent home-based working) was barely 1 percent. Today hybrid areas are emerging, as are nomadic touchdown satellite offices, nomadic working with home as base, teleworking from home part-time and even nomadic working from multiple bases. In the UK, three-quarters of the upper-level work force function in one or the other of these four modes. Working as a nomad with multiple bases is becoming widespread and with the use of mobile phones and WAP (wireless access protocol) technology, there will be an explosion of nomadic work from multiple bases. We have barely scratched the surface.”
Shepherd feels the search for efficiencies will spread the adoption of restructured work patterns.
Says Shepherd: “If we want to increase productivity and shareholder value in the increasingly competitive environment generated by globalization, we’ll have to manage people, property and technology as part of one holistic principle. People no longer have offices, they do their jobs at workplaces that move whenever and wherever people can best do their work. And increasingly this is no longer in a traditional office.”
Wiring up the UK
BT has already begun wiring up the British government, which is putting an increasing number of its services online and expects the trend to spread to the private sector in the UK and later to continental Europe.
Says Shepherd: “People are looking for service when it suits them not when it suits the government. We’re putting government service onto electronic mode so that people can get service whenever they want. We’re moving towards 24-hour government with a target for a certain level of transactions electronically by 2002.”
In the new environment, says Shepherd, the substance of the work output is changing with the way it is getting done.
Says Shepherd: “The European and global aspirations of most companies blows the old nine-to-five workstyle out of the water. As recently as the early ’90s, people were spending 80 percent of their time in their offices processing paperwork and 20 percent doing knowledge work. Today at the upper levels of advanced multinationals in the UK, this has reversed and the knowledge work is not necessarily being done in an office.”
Mind over Matter: The BT Concept
Shepherd feels the IT revolution will shrink firms’ real estate requirements. “If you look at traditional office buildings in Britain, they’re 30-40 percent vacant every day, because people are getting their work done somewhere else,” says Shepherd. “So today, we have to shift the emphasis to managing people rather than real estate, if we want to get more productivity out of our property. Work is no longer necessarily in an office. It is an activity that can take place anywhere. This is uncomfortable news for people in the property business. But these are the facts.”
The BT concept emphasizes productivity rather than space. “If you want to get more out of your property, you have to shift the emphasis to managing the people and channel them through the property only when they need it,” Shepherd explains. “Therefore, buildings have to be reconfigured to provide a large amount of collaborative space. This means meeting rooms, breakout space and networking cafes, because people are going to do their isolated work elsewhere. Workstations and desks no longer belong to any one person. They are shared.”
The crisis cell has drastically altered BT’s office environment. Shepherd reports: “Six or seven years ago, BT space utilization was 90 percent fixed offices and work stations and 10 percent communal meeting space. Today it’s half-and-half. Cellular or individual office space has shrunk to 4 percent. Fifty percent is fixed workstations. The remainder is communal, project or breakout space and cafes or restaurants. This allows you to introduce hot desking.”
Reaping the Rewards
BT has benefited handsomely as occupancy rates have soared. “When we opened our building in May 1994, we put in 1,250 work stations for 1,250 people,” Shepherd says. “Today that building supports 1,800 users for an occupancy rate of 150 percent. And the cost of support per head is reduced dramatically.
“We have an office base of 74,000, and more than half of them have remote access,” he continues.
“Two years ago this was 16,000. With the appropriate telephony in place you can operate wherever you want. A virtual telephone number follows me anywhere in the world. You can reach me no matter where I am — remote access is growing exponentially. Clients who punch clocks are the way of the past.”
BT has reconfigured the environment for the new century’s workplace nomads and preaching this solution to its clients. “We’ve cabled up our entire system with a network infrastructure so people can work there if they want or need to” Shepherd explains. “In any BT building communal areas are available for everybody. After a meeting I can access a touchdown area or go to the cafe or restaurant and get network access. This maximizes my time management. Given a particular task, we should work in the most appropriate location, whatever and wherever it may be. People can work from home, a library or a boat in the middle of a lake. It’s their output that counts.”
According to Shepherd, the availability of flexible workstyles will diminish the need for relocation of facilities.
Says Shepherd: “Relocation costs could shrink or in some cases vanish. The UK Automobile Associations wanted to move out of noisy cramped space. To their surprise, when they closed down the existing facility, they found they didn’t need a building because 150 employees could work from their homes.”
Flexible working style may also cut retraining costs, as employees who must leave for family reasons are kept on the payroll as nomads. “We are making it possible for female employees to continue working from home after pregnancy and thereby keeping access to fully trained personnel,” Shepherd says. “We’re also recruiting the disabled. This reduces dependence on office facilities.”
Recruiters, says Shepherd, are delighted. “We wanted to attract a software guru living in Newcastle in the North of England and a competing firm wanted him to move down to the M4 Silicon Valley west of London. We offered exact same pay and benefits but we allowed him to work from Newcastle. He joined BT.”
Shepherd sees employees benefiting as well as companies. “For office slaves, travel time to work has ballooned,” Shepherd reports. “Years ago you rose at seven, left at eight to be at work at nine. Today you rise at six, leave at seven and still arrive at nine. That’s four hours per day of dead time. The national roads will not improve so we have to do something and the answer is we bring the work to the people. Flexibility shrinks the time lost in travel and employees will take some for themselves — workers gain, the organization gains, customers gain.”
