When our office lease was about to expire, we were given the opportunity to explore new ways to work, mainly based on the principle that we need to adapt to the constant change of the world, so why not the office? And being sustainable was one of the criteria of this change. To change from a traditional to sustainable process, we needed first to agree that we wanted to adopt a mindset of change. We recruited a change consultant (Veldhoen Company) to conduct a full company and lead group training session to get everybody defining the new office principles that we would like to follow.

We adopted the “Activity Based Work” (ABW) style, which designs the office space based on activity instead of hierarchy, and the space is shared among all teammates. This means that we need to have a clear desk, reduced usage of paper to a minimum, no individual trash bin, etc… like in a library 😊

At leadership level, the difficult part was to agree on the main objectives of change. At operational level, it meant a lot of adjustments needed to be done. Identification and exploring, testing work-around were the keys to succeed. For the Finance department, the challenge was to be paper independent, and the way we managed to work around it was to mainly transpose and adapt our traditional Paper process into PDF and Emails digital process.

Thanks to the Activity Based Work style, we were ready to work from home by design, so we were incredibly lucky to achieve this transition before the lock down was even announced.

I am very proud that Edenred Singapore managed to adopt a new way of working and agreed that sustainability is part of the business equation.

• Advice 1: Change is not easy, but there are professionals that do that every day and can help.
• Advice 2: to be successful, it has to be a consensus by “sandwich” approach, i.e. top-down and then bottom-up.
• Advice 3: it is not “if” change should happen, it’s “when” would it be a good time.

Share my experience in transitioning from a traditional office setup (individual assign seat) to an Activity Based Work setup.