HQ at St Paul's
Historic not only in that BT and its predecessors have operated from there since 1874, bur also as it's the site of Marconi's first public wireless transmission.
BT to axe 90% of its UK real estate, retain circa 30 sites
BT is shuttering more than 270 UK offices as part of a three to five-year grand plan to carve out £1.5bn in expenses. This equates to roughly 90 per cent of its local real estate as BT will retain just 30 sites once the dust settles "containing modern, future-fit buildings, including corporate offices, contact centres and …
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Wednesday 5th June 2019 12:22 GMT Semtex451
Hi I'm Marvin try me
I think I'm starting to think like amanfrommars1, if not sound like it. Worse things could happen, true, but probably I need a holiday.
Anyway, once the Developers get hold of all that land I still won't be able to afford to buy a flat.
Also ca 8K UK BT staff on the dole is more bad news in more ways than one. I'm sorry to generalise here, but sadly my experiences of working with or recruiting former BT employees has been universally disappointing, so far.
No offence is intended.
On the upside there's .......mmmm
....always real amanfrommars comments to brighten the week :(
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Wednesday 5th June 2019 16:11 GMT Commswonk
Re: Hi I'm Marvin try me
The better ones get retained at BT.
I wouldn't count on that for one moment. Once the writing appears on the wall the better people decide that they are sufficiently "better" to find gainful employment elsewhere and leave (or better still apply for redundancy & hopefully get a good pay - off) leaving the less capable to take their chances.
Managers tend to neither care nor notice who actually leaves when the primary objective is to reduce the headcount.
More often than not it's the paying customers who finish up getting short - changed because they are stuck having to put up with the consequences of the business having less capable employees.
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Wednesday 5th June 2019 13:03 GMT Steve Button
Empty Offices?
I can't see them being empty for very long if they are closing 90% of their buildings. Although the times I've worked there a lot of buildings have been half empty, so this probably makes some sense. I wonder if they'll allow (force? encourage?) people to work-from-home. Only to do an IBM and pull them all back in again a few years later. People gotta sit somewhere though.
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Monday 8th March 2021 10:41 GMT NeilPost
Re: Empty Offices?
Home ??
After all all employees get free Superfast 2 (where available) Broadband and BTTV.
You can hardly be a key company in WFH whilst denying your people the opportunity.
Most of the ‘new offices’ have shite Smart Climate control, acres of glare inducing Windows (with blinds) and stupid atriums so manage to be both too cold and too hot depending on where the HVAC pipes in.
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Monday 8th March 2021 10:46 GMT NeilPost
I got moved from one side of Birmingham (by airport) to West Bromwich in 2012.
Thankfully our division was in the end not deemed core (part of the cycle at BT see-sawing from diversification and then back to basics) and got flogged and now WFH.
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The office was a BPO deal with Sandwell Council which fell apart and we were just fodder to fill the vacant top floor. No business thinking behind it. Despite being new build sick building syndrome from day 1 - open plan v’s ground floor to ceiling atrium v’s smart building climate control HVAC v’s acres of Windows.
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Wednesday 5th June 2019 14:05 GMT pmb00cs
Re: What are the odds ...
Given the roof in the artists impression looks a lot like the roof of the BT call centre in Doncaster (a glorified warehouse, with desks and telephones) I can well imagine this isn't far from the truth.
Alas that building was not easy to have a telephone conversation in, the noise reverberated awfully, and they had to hang material from the roof to help attenuate the noise levels (which didn't help that much).
Yes the new offices will look a lot like that. Nondescript warehouse with office furniture crammed in. The people who imagine these "workspaces" have clearly never had to work in anything like them.
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Wednesday 5th June 2019 14:02 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
Re: Exchanges?
That's round 2.
The senior management have identified that offering telecom services is terribly expensive and means you need to buy equipment and employ expensive people who know what they are doing.
Instead BT2.0 will concentrate on their core competency of charging you without the legacy baggage of running phone lines
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Thursday 6th June 2019 13:01 GMT Peter Gathercole
Re: Exchanges?
BT have been selling off telephone exchange buildings since they started decommissioning strowger exchanges.
Generally speaking, the equipment needed to be installed in exchanges has been getting more compact and less power hungry (and thus needing smaller UPSs) for about 40 years. Couple that with the decentralization of the cabinet wiring into the DSLAMs and the longer distances enabled by fibre, and BT have a lot of unused real estate in quite valuable positions in towns and cities. They've been selling it off for ages.
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Wednesday 5th June 2019 13:47 GMT Dwarf
Vision vs reality
Looks like those who design offices don't have a clue about what its like to work in them.
Where do you collaborate ?
Where do you store things ?
Where do you put your bag and your lunch ?
Where is the natural light source ?
Where is the cooling in the aircraft hanger ceiling ? - It looks like it will get mighty hot in the summer and freezing in the winter.
How comfortable are the seats to sit on for an extended period ?
I wonder what the office looks like in 3 years once its had no maintenance, everything looks tardy and half the chairs are missing vital bits like arms ?
I wonder which desk the senior management will be sitting at -- oh, no of course these are just cattle desks, not management desks
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Wednesday 5th June 2019 14:59 GMT Jellied Eel
Re: Vision vs reality
1) You don't. Collaborators will be RIFd. There will be no need to collaborate, simply follow the instructions on your screen
2) In the cloud, obviously.
3) Everything will be provided for you. Except lunch, and it is forbidden to eat at your workstation
4) Why would you expect natural light when the vaulted ceilings clearly show it is an underground level. Natural light and coat stands are rewards for senior executives, and FM. Note anyone refering to sub-levels as 'hell desks' will be RIFd.
5) Incorrect. It will get mightly hot when targets have not been achieved, and freezing when warm bodies are surplus to shareholder requirements.
6) Executives have selected materials having extensively reviewed similar operations in abattoirs across Europe. As part of our plan to generate inclusivity and encourage upskilling, cleaning and general maintenance will be the responsibility of everyone. The executive believe this is an exciting opportunity for team building, and have allocated 30mins after the end of each work day to complete, before the doors automatically lock.
7) Out of site, out of mind. Remember, work makes free!
I guess the remaining BT folks should be grateful the exec hasn't embraced the fad for standing room only hot desking. I still despair at the way 'modern' offices are stripped down, back to basics and offer little more than somewhere to sit & work. Which staff can of course do at home with the advantage of having 2x30" monitors instead of the dinky lil BT ones. Also for engineering staff, wot? No whiteboards?
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Wednesday 5th June 2019 14:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
Not too surprising...
TBH, I thought they'd already sold off pretty much every bit of real estate they could, and were leasing selected chunks of it back, in one of those short-term income-boosting maneuvers which comes back to bite you in the long term.
It's not too surprising to hear they're closing more buildings down though - entire floors in the Leeds office were already mothballed when I was working there, around eight years ago. And there was already a drive towards hot-desking at the time, which usually meant you ended up in an echoing and cavernous hall, trying to find a working desk-phone in a relatively quiet spot so you could dial into one of the interminable conference calls which BT thrives on. And if you were lucky, you got to buy a cup of tea from the unsubsidised mini-Costa embedded in the middle of the hall.
I also wonder if this building-reduction strategy is intended to push a few more people into quitting or taking redundancy, similar to how IBM issued a "travel or quit" ultimatum when they decided that they no longer liked people working from home!
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/08/ibm_no_more_telecommuting/
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Thursday 6th June 2019 12:30 GMT localzuk
Oh how true this is. I placed an order for a new line for one of our nursery schools. It was ignored until I chased it, when I was told I need to speak to another dept. Who promptly told me that I needed to speak to yet another department.
That's what their staff do - they pass people to different departments.
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Friday 7th June 2019 10:09 GMT Chronos
Internally, it's called the "Adastral Park Runaround" and there's probably still an ancient Acorn Achimedes sitting in the corner driving a large screen, only instead of showing time to answer it clocks number of redirects with prizes and bonuses if you get it into double figures. Rest assured, localzuk, you're not alone. I think it became policy somewhere between Maggie's Great Sell-Off and the Pan Pipe rebrand.
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Wednesday 5th June 2019 22:27 GMT Laura Kerr
"Sovereign Street was actually pretty good for the BT estate actually. If you had a problem on the flexi desks there I think you just had problems."
Yup, agreed 100%. If you were matey with the cafe staff and Frank on the front desk, it was a good place to work. I used to have a thing for the breakfast butties - if the staff knew you and liked you, you got freshly-cooked bacon and sausages rather than the old shoe leather given to those less-favoured.
But elsewhere, it was a different story. FM and cleaning was a case in point. After a few years in Sausage Street, I was shunted off dahn sarf to the smoke. Not long after I arrived in 120 Holborn, I noticed my rather expensive 1GB memory stick (this was a wee while ago!) was missing. Naturally, I assumed it had fallen out of my bag or I'd left it on the train, or something.
Well, about two years later, there was some sort of financial hoo-haa and travel was curtailed. I went back to my desk in Sovereign Street, and found nothing had changed, apart from some bar steward having nicked my chair and a thick layer of dust on every surface bar the desk. And lo and behold - my long-lost memory stick was on the floor under my desk. So much for carpet cleaning.
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Thursday 6th June 2019 15:40 GMT Erik4872
Looks like they're learning from IBM
I remember reading that IBM did something similar to get rid of workers...consolidating everything down to "key locations" as a way to fire older people who had roots and families and didn't want to move hundreds or thousands of miles.
Not being in the UK -- is this similar to what happened when AT&T was demonopolized? I'm old enough to remember that working for AT&T used to mean lifetime employment and they had massive amounts of real estate and spare capacity because there was no reason for them to get rid of it. I can imagine BT has a similar situation now since they used to be state-owned and have quite a history.
It stinks for all the people they're throwing overboard, and those collaboration dens they're throwing all the remaining staff into look headache-inducing.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
