About two dozen employees of Metro Bank came to know earlier this week what? hybrid work, when he tested the company’s new approach to office life.
Before the opening of the bank’s Moorgate branch in the City of London at 8:30 a.m., colleagues on the Financial Crimes Investigation Team greeted each other in person on Thursday after a year and a half of telecommuting. Entering the building, they turned left and passed through a glass gate before landing at an office newly opened basement below the agency.
The new location is part of a broader asset reform at the bank, as the company adopts a hybrid working model. It vacated its former stand-alone office building and created spaces above – and in some cases below – some of its branches.
or bank, what Employs around 3,000 office workers, 1,100 desks under new hybrid system. Starting September 13, teams will have access to offices through a reservation system that allows employees to reserve a table at multiple locations up to six weeks in advance.
Most of the 26 employees – some of whom started working at the bank during the pandemic and had never been seen inside a Metro Bank office before – said they acknowledged the flexibility the new system offered, seem to accept the concept.
Metro Bank gave more dramatic move Compared to most companies to adjust their operations to a world where the pandemic has made telecommunications increasingly common.
After just three years in a decade-long leased property, Metro Bank moved out of the building near London’s St Paul’s Cathedral when the pandemic broke out last year, costing £41 million (US$56 million) in the process. Paid and displaced 900 workers.
This change signals an increasingly dramatic way in which some banks are rethinking their office requirements. Other UK banks, such as HSBC Holdings and Lloyds Banking Group, have also cut their ownership footprint, while Standard Chartered has signed a contract with the flexible office lessee IWG where its employees live.
“There’s not much difference because working in a branch doesn’t mean you’re affected by what’s happening there,” said Varela Jimungang, who works in an office above Metro Bank’s Holborn branch in central London. “The only difference is that when you enter the building, you have a separate entrance and exit.”
In collaboration with Jack Siders
