Brave Ideas How bp is leaning into the future of work
Andrew Carne, bp’s Global Workplace Procurement Manager & Ciaran Delaney, CEO of MeetingsBooker.com join Bold Founder, Caleb Parker to share insight into their partnership and how bp has balanced the wellbeing of their team members while maintaining their strategic pillars of safety and sustainability.
Andrew shares how bp is evolving their portfolio strategy for hybrid working to empower their teams and enable success where face to face may be less frequent, but more valuable than ever before.
We hear about how they’ve teamed up with meetingsbooker.com to enable over 10,000 employees to book space for focused or collaborative work (aka meetings with colleagues and customers) either near home or anywhere outside the head office via Meetingbooker’s digital booking tool.
bp did a £250M sale and leaseback deal on their London HQ, then right after did a deal with The Office Group for 50,000 SqFt of flexspace. We find out what signal we should take from that.
The discussion goes on to cover the future of commercial real estate, including how the hospitality and commercial real estate industries are beginning to merge, with space operators and hotels starting to compete for workspace customers and a look at the parallels in the business travel industry.
Watch the video version of this episode here:
https://workbold.co.uk/workbold-podcast-season-4-episode-5
*Special shout out to Skift for publishing an early preview of this episode. Skift is the most influential media brand in the global travel industry, also known as the daily homepage of the global travel. As of last year Skift is a fully-distributed company with no physical offices, and teams across various parts of U.S., Europe and Asia. Thank you Rafat Ali and team!
Connect with Andrew on LinkedIn
Connect with Ciaran on LinkedIn
Connect with Caleb on LinkedIn
If you have any questions or feedback on this episode, email podcast@workbold.co
Value Bombs
- There is considerable change ahead
- bp is repurposing their portfolio for task based working; will result in a smaller footprint
- Hybrid working is the future for most people
- Important to have office environments accessible for certain types of work, and for people who can’t work from home comfortably
- Duty of care is an important factor when evolving a workplace strategy
- Meetingsbooker.com helps bp meet their core pillars for development and governance to deliver optimal performance
- The digital booking platform balances the wellbeing of their team members while maintaining bp’s strategic pillars of safety and sustainability.
- There is a convergence in demand for workspace and meeting rooms
- Hotels are starting to compete for workspace customers
- Brand is important because it promises a consistent experience
- The hospitality and commercial real estate industries are beginning to merge
- Business travel procurement directors and real estate directors of enterprise companies are teaming up on workplace strategy
- We’re seeing different use cases
- Some companies are reducing their office footprint, and booking space for their distributed team members to meet weekly
- Some companies who use workplace choice as a recruitment strategy are giving their distributed teams a budget to book 2 days per week with a local coworking operators across dozens of cities around the world
- Other companies with thousands of distributed team members are booking quarterly offsites to bring everyone together
- Digital booking tools are helping enterprise companies navigate this transition period from office first to more agile ways of working
- Every office landlord should be thinking about offering flexible space for people to tap into
- Offices won’t go away, but they will become more flexible to manage fluctuating demand
- Former retail assets will be converted to flexible workspaces to accommodate work near home
We’re going to see more hotels partnering with coworking operators
Resources
Skift preview
https://skift.com/2021/04/02/oil-and-gas-giant-bp-as-a-case-study-on-the-future-of-the-workplace/
bp + MB Case Study
https://www.meetingsbooker.com/case-studies/bp
About Andrew Carne
Andrew is Global Procurement Advisor for bp.
Based in London, England, he globally leads the bp meetings and events programme, as part of bp’s global reinvention of the workplace.
Digital transformation and supply-chain agility is part of his everyday, to create the ecosystem bp needs today, and tomorrow.
About Ciaran Delany
Ciaran is CEO and Founder of Meetingsbooker.com (MB), the global leader in meeting and workspace bookings. With over 150,000 spaces globally, MB helps organisations to adapt to the new normal by creating a dedicated enterprise solution for global teams with inbuilt usage, expenditure and safety controls.
In his position as founding CEO, he conceived the product vision, concept and direction and scaled the growth of the Meetingsbooker.com with meeting and work space across in 134 countries. In this time, he scaled the team, led product design, online marketing, strategic partnerships, and global enterprise client acquisition. MB has raised over €3 million funding from leading venture capitalists and angel investors.
Prior to creating Meetingsbooker.com Ciaran spent 7 years with Tourism Ireland as Market Manager Norway, Italy and then Global Internet Manager. He then became Director of Marketing for the 1,344 bedroom Citywest Hotel where he doubled online revenue and then worked as an independent digital marketing consultant.
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