Economies of scale while adapting to new ways of working: this has been Deloitte’s strategy in the UK since the Covid-19 pandemic. According to information from FinancialTimesthe auditing and consultancy giant will abandon Hill House, one of the buildings on its campus in New Street Square, in the City of London, in May.
Hill House represents more than 17,000 square meters of office space, bringing to 23,000 square meters the area the company sold in London in one year. After the first confinements, Deloitte had not reopened one of its four offices in New Street Square, and also closed a “digital hub”. In total, the firm sells a third of its office space in the capital. Deloitte has extended the leases of the two largest buildings on its campus until 2036, leaving it with 45,000 square meters on the site where the company has been established since 2007.
These major maneuvers will have no impact on employment, indicates a source at the Financial Times. Indeed, the employees working in the abandoned buildings have been, or will be, transferred to the remaining offices. On the other hand, Deloitte had already decided, in 2020, to close offices in Gatwick, Liverpool, Nottingham and Southampton, giving the 500 employees affected the possibility of keeping their jobs if they worked full time from home.
New management methods
To avoid congestion in its premises in the City, the multinational with 345,000 employees in 150 countries relies on hybrid work and the “flex office”, which means that there are more employees than individual offices available. This strategy goes hand in hand with the generalization of telework, while an internal survey revealed that the majority of staff did not want to come to the office more than two days a week. In 2021, the company asked employees to decide for themselves how often they want to work from home.
Along with changing post-Covid ways of working comes the opportunity for Deloitte to save money, especially as the industry faces higher costs to comply with environmental regulations. “We are constantly reviewing our office space needs to reflect changes in our ways of working and our sustainability goals”says Stephen Griggs, UK Managing Partner of Deloitte.
The group is known for exploring new management methods, both for itself and for the companies it advises. In 2016, the new headquarters of its French subsidiary had five types of “flexible” work organization tested by a thousand of its employees, starting with shared offices, already put forward at the time for “enhancing efficiency”.
