Met with the Greater Richmond Partnership and enjoyed our visit with Rowena Fratarcangelo, Gregory Wingfield and Sara Dunnigan. Rowena kindly took us to the Capital One head quarters the following morning based in west Richmond.
Rowena gave us a newspaper article from the Richmond Times business newspaper about ‘Working Moms Best Companies’. This talked about the top best companies to work for – specifically aimed at women.
Definitely an idea to do research in the UK to find out the top best companies for women/mums to work for, who offer the best benefits for flexible working.
The Capital One headquarters was a fantastic place of work to look around – a huge campus covering an area of about 100 acres employing around 7,000 people. The area comprised of about 8 buildings and a lot of parking space areas which were all packed to capacity with cars – a very busy place. Definitely needed a car to get around the place.
This actually provided us with a significant change in culture and a major different focus on looking after and retaining employees. The state of the art facilities and technology and innovative training and development tools gave a huge impression of how much this particular company invests in their employees.
What made a massive impact was how the layout of the offices/work space was provided for people. Basically an employee finds a preferred place (hot desk) to work from, logs on computer, uses instant messenger (similar to what we use on Skype) to show they’re logged on and ready to start work. The emphasis on the production of quality work, providing the right environment which gives the employee much more incentive, trust and flexibility was great to see actually working in a successful setting.
This particular visit provoked so many new ideas around the concept of virtual working.
They mentioned that generally on Friday’s the building can seem very empty due to a lot of employees working from home accessing their work remotely, logging in at home to do the work, again another flexible option for employees.
This gave rise to the concept of teleworking being virtual with the option of working from home with a mix of working on site at a purpose built office environment so employees get chance to interact with each other, attend meetings and training sessions, striking a good productive balance of work.
I did ask about the use of video conferencing due to the number of office bases in different states and countries – they explained that video conferencing was used regularly but still felt that technology was still not stable to the quality they really required e.g. someone would not be able to get sound or talk as part of the group call etc.
The actual buildings inside were extremely well thought out, lots of internal café areas for employees, places for relaxation with large tv screens, a fantastic indoor gym and lots of outside sporting areas as part of the campus for playing team games – very big on team building and getting people to integrate together.
It will be very interesting to look at the Capital One offices in Nottingham in England when we return from the US to find out if they too have adopted this way of flexible working and change in working culture.
Where we will be visiting in the USA
