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Photos: Bankwest Place

Twelve months on, is Activity Based Work still working?

on Aug 19 2013 9:16AM

Walking on a staircase between floors of Bankwest Place, CTO Nick Lewins and I had a chance encounter with the bank's CIO, Andy Weir. "For the third time today," Lewins said. The three of us stood for a few minutes to discuss activity-based working, twelve months after the Perth-based bank embraced the new model. "What just happened demonstrates exactly why it works," Weir noted. "I used to be on the top floor of Bankwest Tower and rarely see the team. Now we're never more than a few metres away."

Bankwest was by no means the first bank to embrace ABW, learning from far bigger projects at Macquarie Bank and Bankwest's parent company, the Commonwealth Bank. But one year on, Bankwest’s IT leaders are confident their transition was among the most successful.

Bankwest Place is a 22-storey building in the Perth CBD.

The bank had previously inhabited BankWest Tower, but after several studies noted that on a day-to-day basis, there was rarely more than 65 percent of staff at their desk.

The bank's enterprise services team piloted a new form of work on one floor of Bankwest Tower. Each provisioned a corporate standard Dell laptop with a new SOE, the staff were told they could sit at any desk within the confines of 'team areas', or at any adjacent meeting space. All desks, breakout tables and entertaining areas were fitted with docks where, upon plugging the laptop in, a standard 22-inch monitor, keyboard, mouse and IP phone handset would configure themselves to the user's requirements. The wired IP network would recognise the user's device, the phone system route all calls to their extension.

In video conferencing and other meeting spaces, plugging the SOE-enabled corporate laptop in logs the user in for a video call.

Based on the pilot, Bankwest originally estimated it would need 18 of the 22 levels of Bankwest place in place of its existing office space aiming to provide a desk space for at least 80 percent of its corporate employee base, But as the ABW model was bedded down, the bank found it only needed 13, including a floor for peers from the Commonwealth Bank, who vacated 3-4 floors of office space elsewhere. Some five additional 1700 square meter floors were sub-leased to a mining company and a law firm. The savings were enormous. To give you an idea, saving 8500 square metres of space back at the bank’s old headquarters, Bankwest Tower, would have saved the company at least $3.5 million a year. The rent at the modern Bankwest Place would be far higher.

But the transition wasn't without its challenges. Anthony Grassi, manager of business engagement at Bankwest, was charged with leading the change management process required to make ABW work. "With most ABW deployments, you spend one to two percent of the total project spend on change management," he said. "BankWest spent close to ten." A careful balance was struck between how employees had traditionally organised themselves and how the bank intended for them to work in the future.

Each "home zone" for teams had roughly enough ports and lockers to meet eighty percent occupancy.

There are quieter zones in the wings of each floor with high partitions for those workers that need to concentrate.

There are more open collaborative spaces towards the centre of each floor, as well as a number of bookable meeting rooms and free-for-all breakout spaces.

"Colleagues have a choice to stay in their home zone, or if their project leads them to work with other people, that's fine, you can plug in on another floor," Grassi said. "It's as easy as that."

The idea of a homezone challenges the ABW purist, but was a key learning from Macquarie Bank. "When Macquarie did ABW in Sydney, their initial approach was to allow colleagues to basically sit where they liked, which leaders later found challenging in terms of maintaining team cohesion. We took this learning onboard and agreed on homezones," Grassi said.

Bankwest has developed an intranet system to overcome the 'free for all' problem earlier ABW projects had suffered with. The company's Locate My Colleague application is an integration between Active Directory and the ABW network which allows staff to search for their peers. If that colleague is plugged into the wired network, their location shows up on the floor plan of the building. And in the next release of the app, the bank intends to integrate its two wireless networks, such that staff can be located according to what wireless access point they are closest to.

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