Coping with explosive growth rates and a phenomenal churn rate is the challenge of a successful company in a growing industry. Managing such growth needs skilled professionals and reliable service partners.
Eircell is the no 1 mobile phone company in Ireland, the sister company to Eircom the landline company. A dynamic and ever growing company that is experiencing dramtic growth rates: 300-1000 people within a year, within another year this expanding to 1500 and maybe 2000 in 4 years, all centred round the Dublin area. There is an awful lot of planning involved, says Aisling Field, Property and Facilities Manager for Eircell. both at a strategic and a daily basis; because not only are total numbers growing but each individual unit grows.
So within a building where a department might fit on one floor, if they grow they will not fit any longer without distrupting another group. There is therefore a huge churn rate and the Eircell FM staff quite typically have to plan for and execute a departmental move every week. So to cope with this, Field has a 5-year plan with new buildings forseen to take account of departmental growth and to reduce the cost of moving and relocating departments around the company’s property portfolio.
It was a long process to establish the furniture that was suitable and fitted the company needs, but having established it they have decided that their business is best served by standardising on Herman Miller’s Vantage system throughout. ‘We started off with MJFlood, Herman Miller’s partner in Ireland, in our Headquarters building.’ says Aisling Field ‘It’s a lovely example of an office and its lovely to work in, so it’s a conscious decision to stick with this system furniture. It’s a comfortable environment and it’s part of what Eircell is, really. It makes the move-in process easier: we know that we can up and move people to another building and it’s the same as what we have there.’
Eircell use the component-based furniture system to good effect by varying the workstation design between different groups, so engineers will have larger configurations to call centres or marketing people, but since the elements all come from the same system they can be re-used many times as needs for different types of staff change over time.
There is a strong corporate look to all Eircell buildings. The company is very brand conscious and wants its offices to be the visual manifestation of the fact that Eircell is a young and dynamic part of the whole business group. This extends to colour schemes, fabrics, carpets, right down to the colour-coordinated bin liners. And of course the furniture, where the architects were given a brief to come up with of a modern, dynamic office.
This attention to the working environment brings benefits when recruiting staff, even in areas where it can be difficult: locally Eircell is known as ‘the nice place to work’ and among the staff there is often an unprompted view that it’s a good place to work in.
‘It’s hard work, changing so quickly,’ says Field ‘but every time we get a new building on board, staff always comment well on it and at the end of the day it’s that kind of feedback that makes it all worthwhile.’
