Audiem has been shortlisted for 3 IWFM Impact Awards 2024
Determined to improve the employee workplace experience across its diverse portfolio of offices and branches, NatWest discovered Audiem when an Area Workplace Manager spotted the potential of an academic paper about a holistic approach to workplace experience that its co-founders had written.
Embracing Audiem’s AI-powered data platform, NatWest encouraged its people to share their experiences in their own words using a range of data sources across the entire business. By using Audiem in a range of different ways, the team has tangibly improved its colleague workplace experience, the impacts of which have been felt across the bank.
This approach combined the efforts of Property, HR, and IT teams, who united around a shared concept of workplace experience. The insights gathered have formed the foundation for NatWest's workplace teams to effect meaningful, often location-specific workplace changes, which have not only gained senior leadership recognition but also secured awards from a number of external bodies.
Barry MacKay, Design Manager
Following a restructure in 2021, NatWest’s Property team joined HR as part of a newly formed People, Productivity, and Transformation division. This led to an increased focus on the colleague workplace experience as a talent attraction and retention tool. Alongside this, the pandemic had triggered the accelerated adoption of hybrid working at the bank, creating a workforce with vastly different physical workplace needs and expectations.
The Property team faced a conundrum: how to embrace and enable hybrid working, while ensuring that the bank’s offices were still part of its talent proposition, within a challenging economic climate that meant their solutions were under more financial scrutiny than ever. This meant needing to better understand the people whose performance they sought to enable.
“Our challenge was the tension between these two competing demands. How could we provide an excellent workplace experience to attract and retain talent, while operating in a difficult economic climate?”
Paul Urmston, Area Workplace Manager
Knowing how hard it can be to change established ways of working, Paul Urmston (Area Workplace Manager) took a creative approach to gain key stakeholder buy-in. Paul introduced an academic paper about holistic workplace experience, written by Audiem’s co-founders, to the Head of Property, who was impressed by the paper’s proposed framework for measurement.
Paul and his colleagues subsequently ran a team workshop to explore the breadth of factors affecting workplace experience, which led to early trial applications of Audiem’s analytical capability using a sample of FM help desk and catering service feedback.
Working closely with the Audiem team, NatWest embraced a ‘test and learn’ approach. Initial focus was placed on traditional colleague feedback methods, including surveys on three local office refurbishment projects. This early test demonstrated the impact Audiem’s platform could have and allowed the bank to collaboratively hone its data collection approach and make evidence-based project design decisions.
“The benefit Audiem gives you is in terms of ‘why’ staff are feeling the way that they are in your organisation. And that’s been really inspiring, because it’s the why that can help us deliver actual change that they’re going to benefit from.”
Paul Urmston, Area Workplace Manager
Confidence quickly grew to run a UK-wide colleague workplace experience survey for NatWest’s office locations, and from there expand the approach to key locations in India as well as exploring new feedback opportunities, particularly from historically hard-to-reach segments like their retail branch network.
Over 18 months, NatWest collected feedback from 23 corporate offices across the UK and India, and more than 500 branches. Quantitative and qualitative data has been analysed, including over 43,000 free-text viewpoints (with over 1,000,000 words) from over 10,000 bank colleagues. This expansive dataset has empowered the bank to move beyond surface-level statistics and into the underlying drivers of workplace experience, providing actionable insights for strategic decision-making within very real financial constraints.
“We have got so many different outputs from various surveys and various feedback across the bank that we have been able to plug into Audiem. Rather than use a specific survey tool that gives you one output, Audiem has been able to take all of them, organise it, and give us actual quality output from it.”
Paul Urmston, Area Workplace Manager
Prior to Audiem, NatWest relied on a quantitative tool to gauge their overall workplace experience. This essentially measured ‘what’ was important to people. While informative for benchmarking, the bank struggled to translate this data into the ‘why’ insights they needed to inform useful changes. Since engaging Audiem, the bank has proudly achieved two industry benchmark awards, for the first time recognising them as top-tier workplaces.
Both of the award-winning projects were informed by Audiem data analysis, ensuring an experience-led refurbishment approach, instead of the previous, and far more typical, workspace design-led approach. It was a bold move to lean away from industry recognised benchmarks to embrace a new approach and analysis tool, and the payoff has been significant. The approach has rapidly established a new workplace experience mindset around a data tool with broad relevance.
“Audiem has allowed us to build out a great platform to understand workplace experience a cross our buildings. It is very rare in the bank that we manage to bring together colleagues from across property, HR and tech and it was fascinating for everyone to see how they all interlinked – it’s what we hoped would happen but to see it unfold was brilliant.”
Andy McBain, Head of Future of Work and Office Design
Audiem has provided NatWest with a new way to capture and analyse the true essence of colleague workplace experience, uncovering not just what matters to the bank’s workforce, but more importantly, why it matters. Framed within an academically reviewed framework of workplace experience that includes cultural, workspace, and technological themes, the bank can now strategically allocate its workplace investments and address colleague concerns in a smarter, evidence-based manner.
With confidence in the quality and validity of the insights, Audiem now informs the bank’s workplace experience charter. As user confidence grows, established channels for feedback collection, including help desk tickets, NatWest's in-house facilities, and IT chatbot AskArchie, along with monthly supplier KPI data, all present promising new opportunities for experience insights. These pave the way, alongside QR code location-based deployment, for an 'always-on' colleague feedback ecosystem within the bank.
"It’s allowed us to speak a common language across the bank that everyone can understand"
Fiona Walmsley, Head of Property
