Waterside oasis helps BA handle turbulence

Our final article on managing change highlights British Airways' revolutionary sterling 200m HQ.

By Selwyn Parker

If you blink during Europe's air wars, you might get left on the runway. Few commercial battles are as relentless or fast-moving as this one. Air fares and frequencies change almost daily in today's open skies. Profits rise and fall spectacularly. Competitors come and go.

This is clearly an environment that requires quick and good decisions. That's easy enough for small competitors like the discount airlines who can react nimbly, but it's harder for companies like British Airways to change direction.

British Airways' solution is a sterling 200 million ($600 million) village called Waterside, into which it shifted 2,800 of its decision-makers. But forget your quaint olde English village. Waterside's only resemblance to the villages you see in postcards is in its cobbled street. Otherwise it's all glass and steel.

Designed by a Finn called Neils Torp, Waterside is all open plan with the offices placed both sides of The Street - the cobbled walkway which extends the length of the building. It might be, as somebody remarked, "a Finn's idea of an English village" but the configuration is designed to force employees of all ranks to mix.

Open plan hardly covers it. You can hardly scratch yourself without a few hundred people noticing. Basic bodily functions aside, somebody can see what you're doing or hear what you're saying most of the time, and this is the way it's meant to be.

Waterside is also an extremely wired building - electronics alone cost over $30 million. There are no such things as extension numbers for desks. Instead, employees have their own contact number which they use from phone stations anywhere in the building or from cell phones or British Airways offices around the world. This is probably why employees walk around talking into tiny microphones suspended from their ear lobes.

Many employees don't have a desk of their own. Instead they "hot desk", meaning they grab any one that's free. Not even British Airways' chief executive, Bob Ayling, has a desk, just a coffee table on the third floor which he visits from time to time. Ayling apparently likes this but some of the directors, according to insiders, took it hard. The building has designed out hierarchical management. Forget designated car parks, executive restaurants, offices with name plates, even boardrooms.

Appointments are practically banned. Within reason, employees are encouraged to barge in anywhere, even into the Hub, where the senior executives work. "I've been into see Bob a couple of times," observes a mid-20s employee who has worked in communications for two years. To everybody in the building, Ayling is just plain "Bob".

Clock-watching is out. "You're judged by your performance here, not by how long you spend in the office," explains Richard Kennedy, a former management consultant with the airline who conducts guided tours.

If employees aren't at their desk, they're probably having an impromptu conference in one of the subsidised health-food restaurants. In Waterside, calculates its project director, Chris Byron, there are an estimated 40 different ways of working which "form an invaluable aid to our personal effectiveness and reduce costs."

They're a pampered lot at Waterside, with every facility on hand. For example, employees order their groceries by phone from Waitrose, the in-house supermarket. But, phone-in groceries aside, does this building work? Remarkable as it is, a few bugs still have to be ironed out. According to a recent survey, the $30 million worth of electronics aren't being used to their full potential, particularly in the area of electronic diaries.

Hot-desking is popular but staff have yet to adapt their filing and storage systems to suit. E-mail is overused. "Too much time is spent reading e-mails," scolded the survey. It's not unusual for employees to receive 120 e-mails a day. And, although Waterside is designed to break down rigidities in management, some meetings have become a bit too relaxed. Byron says more formal agendas are necessary.

Regardless, after a year in operation, Waterside seems to be a hit. "There's a significant improvement in the ability to communicate and work in teams," concludes Byron. Just about everybody you talk to is enthusiastic about working there and say they've got to know colleagues right across the company.

And everybody agrees that Waterside is a 100 per cent improvement on British Airways' old headquarters at Hatton Cross where, senior management say, it could take half an hour to get to and from meetings and where there was little interconnection between decision-makers except on a formal basis. "I found the place intimidating whenever I visited there," remarked an overseas-based executive.

It's too early to say what effect British Airways' sterling 200 million experimental building will have on the bottom line. In a tough market, the airline's operating profit in 1998 was sterling 355m down on the previous year but, to be fair, Waterside's benefits are not meant to show up for a few years yet. In the meantime, the irony is that British Airways' primary tool in managing turbulence is a wired oasis of calm and conviviality, to quote Bob Ayling, where the air wars seem a long way away.

* Selwyn Parker flew courtesy of British Airways.