VÚB Slovakia Case Study

Area

sq m

16520

Number
of employees

1890

Project duration

in months

Location

Bratislava

Slovakia

The Client

VÚB is Slovakia’s second largest bank. It’s the only bank in the country to provide a full range of public, corporate and investment services, which it delivers through 182 retail outlets, eight Magnifica centres, 32 branch offices and 11 mortgage centres.

The Goal

First, to analyse VÚB Bank’s current and future office space needs. Then, propose a set of upgrades to their workplace organisation, spatial changes and change management. And finally, to transform their office into a workspace tailored to the post-pandemic hybrid working world.

Tools and Methods

A collaborative approach from day one

VÚB ensured all their people understood the importance of the project, which helped our tools and processes gain detailed data valuable insights on their working practices and needs. The result was a hugely rewarding analysis phase.

A visioning workshop with the Board of Directors
20+ workshops with department directors
15+ interviews with line managers
50+ people in multiple team leader and employee workshops
600+ responses to online questionnaire
Five weeks of occupancy measurement with 250 sensors across four buildings in two cities, recording over 480,000 data points
Multiple site walks and inspections in Bratislava and Poprad
Existing documentation analysis

Key findings and insights

Room for improvement

All our activities were aimed at understanding how the company operates. We learnt what its goals are in terms of office strategy, middle managers’ perception of the current and future offices, what it needed for teams to be effective and what workstyles are dominant across the organisation.

The group felt they had enough space for internal meetings and group work
Highly-focused individual work – which employees spend over 30% of their time doing – was not well supported
Employees had little space for conference calls
There was very little space to relax
Over 50% of employees wanted to keep the current workspace setup
24% considered the amount of light and openable windows critical to productivity
42% would welcome an updated fit-out and new office furniture
39% felt the environmental comfort could improve
Employees had little space for conference calls

5 VÚB Workstyles

To make sure the new office design met the above needs, we explored VÚB’s five dominant workstyles.

Processors

Admin work, scheduling, working with email, low-capacity tasks

Deep thinkers

Analysing, writing reports, creating, high-capacity tasks

Connectors

Connecting with others, internal meetings, external meetings, actively working in groups

Operators

Phone calls both individually and in groups, managing inbound/outbound calls

Activity-based workers

A little of everything, no dominant workstyle pattern

The result

New spaces to improve productivity and wellbeing in hybrid workspace

Each workstyle group spends their time differently. So our Workspace Strategy proposal included a number of individual zones and space types that address different needs.

Acoustic Phone Booths for individual, undisturbed phone calls

Stand-up Meeting Rooms for quick, short meetings, updates and huddles

Special Video Meeting Rooms for hybrid/remote meetings with clients and colleagues

Silent Rooms where groups of people work in undisturbed quiet

Focus Rooms where individuals work in undisturbed quiet with visual and acoustic privacy

Relax Rooms for when everyone needs to pause and recharge

In the Bratislava HQ, we created Destination Floors to bring specific functions and teams together. Employees who need their services can complete tasks quickly – making vertical communication more effective and easing elevator traffic and wait times.

Embracing all workstyles

Another important aspect of the project was to optimise the current footprint and bring in new space types.

Managers agreed to give up status offices in favour of meeting rooms, focus rooms, silent rooms, stand-up rooms and other space types
Managers who kept their offices agreed that people could use them when they weren’t in the office
We suggested how much time people could work remotely based on their individual team’s workstyles
Home office working led to desk sharing policies being set for individual departments, not the entire organisation

In close partnership with VÚB’s HR and Organisation Department as well as VUB’s Real Estate Department, we created workspace boasting a rich variety of areas and facilities that directly respond to employees’ needs.

954 department shared desks
260 hot desks
150 fixed desks
28 focus rooms
12 silent rooms
85 manager offices
10 small meeting rooms
8 medium meeting rooms
21 video meeting rooms
8 relax rooms

Watch or webinar with the client

Want to know more about the project? (which was accelerated by the corona crisis)
Watch our webinar to learn how our consulting services helped VÚB get a deeper understanding of what it needed to create a space that inspires its people every day.

„We didn’t quite like returning to the new normal. We did our own research – which was positive during the first wave, what we want to keep and transfer to our new smart culture. That was the beginning of a whole reorganisation, the result of which we all enjoy today.”

Dragana Smolović, Head of HR and Organization at VÚB Bank

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