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We recently attended a briefing on sustainability and ICT from BT Global Services (BTGS). Of course there were the obligatory stories about data-centre consolidation, virtualisation and the use of video conferencing that have all led to a reduction in BT’s carbon footprint and claimed cost reductions. However, BTGS was keen to offer a wider view of the company’s efforts to improve its sustainability credentials and the additional spin-offs that come from adding intelligence and orchestration to its networks and systems.
The benefits of flexible working practices go beyond sustainability
BTGS is a services organisation, so it not only has a preponderance of knowledge workers who could in theory ‘work from anywhere’ but it also has a large mobile workforce. While it’s not the same as a retail bank, a retailer or a manufacturer, where the majority of workers have to be on site or in store, commercial and public sector organisations are filled with back-office workers and sales forces that don’t need to be tied to a fixed office location five days a week. BTGS’s ‘Work Anywhere’ policy allows for flexible working and location independence. As a network provider and IT supplier, it has obvious economies of scale and capabilities that enable it to overcome some of the hurdles and objections to home working that characterise many organisations outside the IT sector. But even so, the benefits of enabling home working and location independence go beyond the 58% reduction in carbon emissions, the 1.5 million journeys eliminated per year, and the consequent reduction in fuel and travel savings. The secondary benefits identified by BTGS included:
20% improvement in productivity from home working compared to office-based workers
reduced absenteeism
greater staff retention – especially among women returning from maternity leave
recruitment benefits for workers attracted by flexible working policies
reduction in office property costs.
BTGS is building a £100 million business around its Work Anywhere managed services. The target customers include the public sector, notably local government, where there are strong incentives to reduce property costs and carbon footprints while improving efficiency and productivity. The commercial sector has been slower to embrace flexible working for knowledge workers, but quick to implement field-force automation strategies. BTGS expects the adoption of flexible, location-independent working practices to increase in the commercial sector over time and sees potential in the UK, German, US and French markets.
Expanding virtualisation to customer-facing roles
As a network provider, BT is one of the vendors leading the movement towards IT and communications convergence in the workplace. It’s now applying the technology to support ‘home-shoring’ for its contact-centre agents. If you thought virtualisation was just about data centres and desktops, think again – BT applies the term to contact centres. Using intelligence in the IP network and multi-channel access to its call centres and agents (email, instant messaging, self-service and voice), BT is able to support home workers in customer-facing roles.
BT currently has around 100 home-based agents in its Retail and Conference businesses, and again the benefits go beyond sustainability. They include:
improved agent utilisation and (surprisingly) faster agent response
improved agent retention (’home-shorers’ like it)
increased recruitment pool for agents (home-shoring suits disabled people, students and the semi-retired)
easier resourcing for anti-social hours (agents are happier to do ’split shifts’ logging on in the morning and then later in the evening).
The flexibility and ability to ‘virtualise’ contact centres can also be applied within businesses. BTGS has implemented virtual contact-centre solutions at a betting chain in the UK that enables suitably trained staff at its branches to be used as contact centre agents when there are lulls in activity at the branches.
The examples of how BTGS is using network, mobile and virtual desktop technologies to enable home working and greater flexibility in the workforce are not applicable to all organisations. However, they will resonate with many in both the public and commercial sectors. What they illustrate most of all is that the business case for using technology to help businesses reduce their overall carbon footprint is strengthened by a range of secondary benefits that make for a happier, more productive and more flexible workforce.
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