Siemens: Freedom of movement - Roland De Coninck and Robert Custers

It started simply enough when Roland De Coninck of Siemens' real estates department undertook a pilot project in the IT division. Representative of most other places within the organisation, it was seen as antiseptic and uninspiring to the sort of bright young talent the company was always seeking to recruit.

"At the time we analysed only the physical aspect," says De Coninck, "and simply changed the work environment, the decor and the furniture. It was very beautiful at the beginning, but after six months there was chaos. There were no rules. Everybody did their own thing. They didn't use the paperless principle, nor the clean-desk principle."

De Coninck and his team went back to the drawing board. Work processes had to be analysed to assess the ultimate value of what each worker did in the company, together with their duties and the range of their activities. The toughest, challenge was managing the culture of change and working out how to cope with the inevitable resistance that virtually any transformation, let alone a profound one, engenders within an organisation.

The areas of sensitivity turned out to be those directly related to status, or to be more specific, the size of a manager's office, the size of his company car and the proximity of his parking space to his desk. De Coninck, now Siemens' corporate mobility manager, explains: "Until the changes, office space was allocated in line with the levels of responsibility within the organisation. The higher you were, the bigger your office. It is the culture throughout Europe.

"But then we came along and said that work is not a place, it's an activity, and therefore the place that you need is not dependent on your seniority; it depends purely on your duties."

De Coninck and his colleagues found themselves regularly fielding the argument from senior executives that they needed a private space in which to conduct confidential conversations. The answer these managers received was that they could use a private room whenever they needed one.

Throughout Siemens' Belgium and Luxemburg operations, staff were given hot desks instead of their own permanent workspace. They were also encouraged to work from home if that made sense. Most importantly, they were actively discouraged from travelling to meetings. Siemens pushed the video-conferencing alternative hard using new and powerful tools.

Cultural revolution

Mobility management seems to have had some unexpected consequences. Before the changes, says De Coninck, around half of the 3,000 local workforce would change locations in the course of a year, as a result of mergers and acquisitions or because of internal reorganisation. By instituting the hot-desk principle, whereby employees who came into the office that day worked wherever there was a spare space, there has been an appreciable breakdown in the once rigid dividing line between departments, not to mention better communication.

This, he adds, has also benefited Siemens' customers: "It has improved the face that we give to them, because now we no longer have the disparate independent units that existed before."

He reports that staff surveys indicate that productivity has grown by roughly 10%, which is largely ascribed to the fact that employees have more time to work because they are not travelling so much. "I think there has also been a change in the culture of our company," says De Coninck. "We have become more innovative, are more open to new technology and more open in the new management style that we have."

It is now a case that 80% of Siemens' employees in Belgium and Luxembourg can work from anywhere, supported by IT. Only those whose work requires it are given more advanced laptops and Blackberry smartphones. Senior managers no longer acquire such tools as a right. Indeed, the whole ethos of management has been turned on its head.

The prime role of Siemens managers is to support and enable the work of those in their charge, says De Coninck: "They are asked to have an attitude of humility towards employees, instead of showing off their status. The old directive style of management has been replaced with a more participative process to promote more trust, courage, confidence and passion."

Space for compromise

One of the hardest sells to top managers had nothing to do with staff relations, and everything to do with parking spaces. De Coninck and his team assigned each employee a low, medium or high level of mobility. This led to the highly sensitive parking issue.

"We saw that we needed to give our best parking spaces to our customers and also to those who needed to be most mobile, who are the staff who make our biggest sales volume, along with our technical people who support clients. These people need the minimum time to find a good parking space. The minute you lose looking for a space is a minute you could have used invoicing a customer."

Staff such as those in accounts and other back-office functions, who needed to come to the office daily but then went nowhere, were encouraged to use public transport, bicycles or car sharing. If they did insist on bringing their car, parking was found for them, but not close to the office.

"This was a complete reversal of what had happened before," says De Coninck. "There was some discussion about this, of course. High-level managers insisted they needed parking close to the office. That was a challenge."

Then there was the question of the cars themselves. "It is still a fact that today we have a one-on-one relationship between car and driver," says Robert Custers, regional commodity manager, supply chain management, fleet south-west Europe. "Every employee that is entitled to have a company car has one car exclusively for his or her own use, fully aware that this car is going to be spending more time standing still than actually driving on the road."

Custers manages a fleet of some 8,000 vehicles in Belgium, Luxembourg, France Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece, most of which are diesel, while only very few are commercial. The rest are company cars for work and leisure. In the middle to long term, he says, Siemens is looking to manage the fleet very differently. It is not simply the introduction of electric vehicles - of which the Belgian operation will have ten by year-end - but about introducing the concept that employees, including senior managers, will share vehicles from the company pool.

Thus, while an e-car will be used for journeys within the average 130km range of current batteries, combustion-engined cars will be available for longer journeys, and even people carriers for when a member of staff wishes to take the family on holiday.

This summer Siemens signed a deal with Volvo to develop the drivetrain for the new Volvo C30 electric car. The company also agreed to take 200 of the vehicles for use in its fleet, principally for its Munich HQ. The overall aim is nothing short of changing the staff mindset about vehicle ownership and use.

Green with envy

Initial staff experiences with e-cars have been gratifying."People are proud to be on the road with this kind of vehicle," remarks Custers. "Because they are still new, there is a feeling of innovation. People are turning their heads. Instead of parking a big Mercedes or BMW on their drive at home, they have an e-car. It's actually another kind of status-building."

De Coninck adds that it is not only the business re-engineering that has boosted Siemens appeal for bright young graduates. The e-car initiative is also having an impact.

"Being green is a new kind of status for young people," he says. "Just like those in the older generation were trying to build their image with big and expensive cars, so the younger generation regards being green as good for the image."