First Look! 👀 Inside Lloyds' 250M London Workspace Revolution: Mastering Non-Traditional, Digital-First Design with Paula Rowntree

0:00Yeah, no, that would be amazing. And yes, I'm going to get straight. I know you're all dying to see the space inside Lloyd's HQ, but I have got a question for Paula, which I think I've been dying to ask. I don't blame you if you are too. But Paula, this office, like grey desks, I'm picturing all these white walls, grey carpet. yeah um people come back into this and what we're about to see like I just go down the whole route of like workplace culture productivity talent acquisition talent retention oh my boom like there's so much there like how has that changed the business what's the feedback been oh it's it's I mean it was a fundamental part of the brief really was you know going from the words on the on the page to be sort of you know traditional blah boring to you know um cool modern funky tech enabled that's a huge thing right and it's more than just you know a physical space i mean there's been a whole um sort of you know culture um shift there's been multiple programs that you know my job is just to you know like really bring the space to to life and to think about how we do that um but some of the things that we we deliberately set out to do were things that you know we we kind of wanted people to go really you do you're doing that oh that's a bit different to to kind of make them reframe in their mind what lawyers banking group was all about because you know we've got people in this building and in other buildings that have maybe worked with a company they were just brand new and they're starting and to them this is like this is normal it's like wow this is this is great this is this is the job I signed up to because this is what how you talked about it um when I was in the job application or the interview process or I came for an interview and it was in a space like this this is amazing this is what I'm expecting to other people like me this is my 37th year within the bank and I've seen it through all the phases I know thank you um started when I was 11 um but um you know for people like me it's like I've seen people go I've seen the bank go through changes so when you come into a building you're like wow I didn't even know work could be like this or could you know it was possible to work in a space like this you can see you know different people with different tenures or just different roles like really responding in you know such a positive um way um we did so before we did um this one in London, we did Leeds and Manchester.

2:32Last year's we've got a lot of learnings. And in Leeds, we did a bit of a survey out afterwards and things like that. And I think 92 % of colleagues said that the place was better than they thought it was going to be and that their working life was so much improved. And we were like, yeah, that's amazing. What about the apes then? Because we're perfectionists. But to get that kind of a response right just gave us a lot of reassurance that we were on the right track. So then to do this one, you know, we were a lot more confident that we were, you know, that we were going to get the design right here to kind of really make that work.

3:09And it is that, isn't it? It's that continually evolving learning. I totally get right. Super excited. Let's get on this tour. Let's go walking around. So we are now on the ground floor and it is busy. I totally get it. It's two o 'clock. So there's probably people that are finishing up lunch and things, but paul is going to take us in um yeah it's i think there's going to be some surprises let's go yeah we're gonna whistle stop tour yeah so within the front entrance and what we really want us to do is we're just bring the brand to life so normally it is green um it's for a green brand and then we've got the the horse um celebrated and throughout the space um but then what we can do with the digital elements which we'll show you in a second we can sync everything to celebrate different seasonal activity and then when we have purple disability we'll do purple and for other things we'll you know where we can sync the lights we'll sync the lights but otherwise we'll you know we'll kind of celebrate activities through with some of the digital the digital networking and the digital screens.

4:15Yeah I want to pick up on this I don't know because I know it's kind of obvious that you are a digital first brand it's kind of obvious but it actually wasn't for me like I was quite surprised how advanced you were digitally and yeah I don't know like how did this always come come about this living wall so it's probably started um because my background has been in the retail and so the branch design space so a big thing about what we've been doing is um thinking about sustainability so print and paper and posters um is really sort of a thing of the past um and it's not very sustainable and you're kind of you know burning that amount of paper um so one of the things we wanted to do was was really think hard about our sustainability agenda but also thinking about how we could communicate to our colleagues um so really what we've done basically is create a digital um display network so we have consistency in all of our buildings as well which is a big part of what we wanted to do so the branding and we've gone for it in this building because it is our HQ but if you go into any of our buildings whether it's here Manchester Leeds in Leo we did recently you will feel like you're in the brand and the same brand but you sort of feel an experience here and a combination of that has been you know sort of the planting the lighting the you know the kind of finishes um the componentry the digital so if you were in Hyderabad today you would still be seeing this except it would be saying welcome to Hyderabad or welcome to Lloyds Technology Center right amazing so we're trying to sort of make sure that you know we've got that communication channel really thought through um so we'll have these kind of screens in our in our front entrance and it's so important to have that familiarity for well neurodiverse leave it everybody actually like that kind of well from brand consistency but so from that familiarity it is and there's also um we have been so one of the things we've been really proud of we started it in the retail space and we transitioned it into the office is a cultural calendar and a cultural um it's to support different cultural um sort of things that are happening um throughout the year so that might be the obvious sort of christmas um but we also do the happy holly with all the kind of you know the bursts of the paint colors and um you know you name it we have probably got it in there right down to mother's day father's day um but really thought about it and worked with you know teams that have been able to kind of inform us to sort of how do we do this in the right way and the best way um so we've got a huge a cultural calendar that just seasonally kind of just happens and we refresh the content and make sure that you know we've got that diversity and inclusion really sort of coming through right the way you know starting really from as you as you sort of walk in