How One Financial Institution Transformed Collaboration

Mission:

This multi-national bank is one of Europe’s leading financial services groups. It is also one of its most venerable, having been founded over 100 years ago. Over that time, its mission endures: to protect and manage assets and savings, finance projects, protect clients in their day-to-day lives and in their professional activities, ensure secure transactions, and offer the best technological solutions.

For this project, the bank was moving circa 3,000 of its employees from three existing London office locations to its new headquarters in London’s Canary Wharf. Canary Wharf is one of the city’s two main business districts and a major world finance centre.

AVI-SPL’s part in this undertaking was to equip the new headquarters with solutions that help the client’s people collaborate with one another, as well as their partners and clients.

“This project was all about the user experience,” says James Gilham, senior project manager for AVI-SPL. “We needed to help the client deliver a high level of satisfaction to their staff.”

Action:

Over a year’s period, AVI-SPL UK worked with the consultant, macom Group, and the client to provide the AV design and integration into the new Bank Street building, the new UK headquarters. After a series of workshops, utilisation of a proof-of-concept room in one of the existing buildings, and numerous feedback sessions, we worked with the client and understood the kind of capabilities they wanted, we were able to get a sense of what the full experience would feel like and how important the user experience was to the client.

The building has 150 private client meeting rooms and internal meeting spaces. Each room includes a Sharp NEC Display Solutions C-Series display and an HP Slice conferencing system that uses the Skype for Business Platform for collaboration. People in these rooms can use Slice to easily manage their meetings with functions that start calls, add attendees, and share content.

The rooms also feature a Crestron MD switcher and a Pulse Origin wireless sharing device. With the switcher, attendees can choose which content to send to the display. And the Pulse Origin enables them to share content from their device to the Sharp NEC Display Solutions display.

In divisible spaces across multiple floors, the client’s staff can easily change the configuration of the rooms to suit the style of meetings.

The fifth floor has two large divisible boardrooms that each feature two 98” Sharp NEC Display Solutions C-Series displays that can deliver content during video conferencing calls as well as during presentations. Both boardrooms have a Cisco camera-tracking system that interfaces with the room’s microphones to focus on the participants at each seat. This is an essential feature in today’s hybrid workforce environment, when so many more meeting participants are joining from off-site.

Those in the room can control the video conferencing and presentation systems by using two Crestron TSW touch panels, which can also control the lighting and room blinds.

The fifth floor also has meeting spaces tailor-made for customers. As with the boardrooms, they include a Sharp NEC Display Solutions C-series display, Cisco Webex video conferencing system, Pulse Origin wireless sharing device, and Crestron HDMI switcher, which offers flexibility to customers using wired and wireless devices.

AVI-SPL’s Training and Adoption team played a key role in the move of all those employees into the client’s new HQ.

“We held workshops to make sure the adoption program met the needs of all of the users,” says Emma Pieper, marketing manager, AVI-SPL UK.

They also used proof-of-concept rooms in the existing HQ to deliver training to a group of early adopters. These “change champions” would then pass on their knowledge and experiences to the rest of the team.

Pieper’s team also created bite-size training videos to deliver key messages to the entire workforce to prepare them for the upcoming changes and the move into the hew headquarters.

As the project neared its end, the training team instructed over 95 percent of the staff over a three-month period. Training covered booking, wayfinding, video conferencing, wireless sharing, and first-line technical support. And an AVI-SPL technical trainer was on site for the next three months to help the staff settle in.

The final piece of support was a suite of on-demand support material. This includes training videos and instructional user guides stored on a microsite made specially for the client. Its users can access the microsite using QR codes that are available on cards in the meeting spaces.

Impact:

The new headquarters offers amazing views across the Thames. Also impressive is the Christie video wall that greets employees and customers as they enter the building’s reception area. This video wall meets one of the client’s key objectives: Capture the attention of all who enter the headquarters with news updates, welcome messages, important information for employees, and financial service updates.

The feedback from the client’s staff about the training and adoption program has been overwhelmingly positive. Users were completely comfortable and prepared to move into the new building as they felt the training and adoption delivery and support material was informative and easily accessible when and where they needed it. They also said that the equipment and systems were intuitive and simple, which meant that the move wasn’t so daunting. They felt they could move and continue to go about their everyday jobs with minimal disruption.

By helping the client move to a completely flexible, hybrid workplace, this project met their overall goal to implement a way of working that empowers their people to work how and where is most effective for them, their team, their clients, and the business. It was enabled by evolving technology, innovative workspaces, and new attitudes. AVI-SPL UK helped to achieve this empowerment through: