BT Workstyle

Flexible working provides a better work life balance, reduces environmental impact, cuts costs and improves customer focus

The BT Workstyle project has enabled the company and its people to become more agile and efficient, in order to meet increasingly demanding and varied customer expectations in a 24x7 market

The Business Challenge

Caroline Waters, BT Group Director of People and Policy, says: “We have to satisfy demands for our products and services around-the-clock. There is no room for a traditional nine-to-five working day because that just can’t meet the demands placed upon us as a business.”

Flexible working would provide BT people with the ability to effectively undertake their jobs wherever and whenever they needed to: aiming to achieve agreed outcomes, quality and timescales without rigid working patterns or locations. The ethos would support different modes of operation, such as home working.

Caroline Waters continues: “It’s about freeing our people. For customer-facing staff, the shift to flexible working would allow us to move from a very heavily process oriented environment to one where our people would be empowered to make real time decisions for the customer.”

There would be considerable cost advantages too. For example, BT’s office estate in 1993 was estimated at over 1.9 million square metres, costing the organisation over €1.8 billion a year to run.

The company knew that flexible working would significantly reduce traditional office requirements and its associated overheads.

Solution

The company’s own realisation of flexible working was called the BT Workstyle Project. It incorporated the following key elements:

Culture change
Creation of a flexible estate
Accommodation rationalisation
A robust, scalable and flexible technology platform

David Dunbar, Head of BT Workstyle at BT Global Services, says: “Failure was not an option with flexible working. Success was all about quick wins and communicating the results and the benefits internally to motivate staff.”

In fact, BT had been expanding home working for several years, refining its technology to ensure the products and services that people needed to do their jobs away from the formal workplace are in place and work first time. Learning from early mistakes, care was taken to ensure that the models were capable of being rolled out throughout the organisation. This ensured that the full calculated benefits would accrue when the implementation attained critical mass.

Results

BT Workstyle is believed to be one of the largest flexible working projects in Europe with some 70,000 BT employees now involved. By mid-2006, with flexible working available to virtually everyone in the organisation, approximately 50 employees were signing-up for home working every week in the UK alone.

Currently, BT’s office estate has been reduced to 743,000 square metres, saving BT €725 million-plus per annum. Within that figure, BT’s 11,600 home workers save the company €104 million a year in accommodation costs, and are on average 20 per cent more productive than their office-based colleagues. For example, home working BT call centre operators handle up to 20 per cent more calls, giving comparable or better quality response than their officebased colleagues.

Happier BT people are enjoying a better work life balance, leading to a more fulfilling existence in which they can more easily meet their developmental needs. BT home workers are taking 63 per cent less sick leave than their office-based counterparts. The retention rate following maternity leave stands at 99 per cent compared with a UK average of 47 per cent. For BT this means that of the 1,000 women taking maternity leave each year, BT retains an additional 500 compared to the average UK company.

Estimates suggest that recruiting and inducting a replacement costs €14,800, so BT is saving an additional €7.4 million a year. Mothers like the flexibility; and BT retains their skills and their potential.

In this section

BT Workstyle

Flexible working provides a better work life balance, reduces environmental impact, cuts costs and improves customer focus

The Business Challenge

Solution

Results

Further information