About Manish Singh, Cluster Head of Property – India & South Asia, Standard Chartered Bank
With an overall experience of over 26+ years in banking, pharma, paints and chemicals and American automobiles, Manish has been associated with Standard Chartered for nearly 12 years and is also the Standard Chartered GBS member of Global Property Executive Management team and the member of India Core Management Team.
He has intricate leadership background along with an excellent track record of successfully managing headship roles in the Corporate Real Estate Industry at country, regional and global level and has driven and delivered several pioneering CRE initiatives to support business/organization growth and transformation.
Currently at Standard Chartered, he is leading end-to-end CRE delivery – real estate asset management, project management, business alignment and workplace strategies, wellness and employee experience, facility management, technical – energy & environment, property risk and safety-security.
How can adaptive office spaces, that are being heralded as the future of workplaces, address the changing needs of businesses?
The economic impact of the crisis differs wildly for businesses. Things should start to feel normal(ish) and operate like before – with some differences. Temperature checks to enter buildings and face masks will be ubiquitous. But for some industries, recovery will be gradual.
The traditional “day at the office” has changed. The future will likely centre around adaptive workplaces—a more fluid model providing employees greater flexibility to work from wherever they are most productive, empowering them to do their best work, and delivering better performance for employers.
While government agencies are still adjusting to the rapid virtualization of work, Emerging data indicates that organizations that employ adaptive workplaces can experience significant organizational and workforce experience benefits.
While remote work has its benefits, there are certain jobs and activities that cannot easily or more efficiently be carried out in a virtual manner. For example, conducting on-site audit and inspections, dealing with highly classified information, maintaining facilities and physical infrastructure, work involving the physical movement of products, people, and things, and related activities. Furthermore, as social animal, there is immeasurable value in face-to-face, human interaction and the development of interpersonal relationships that can’t easily be achieved in virtual settings.
For these reasons, adaptive workplaces have become even more attractive in a post pandemic world when situations involving dependent and childcare normalize, and social isolation is minimized. This employee centred thinking that empowers workforce to voice preferences and provide input on workplace decisions—and ideal workplace where they are most engaged and effective—can open the door to an entire spectrum of possibilities
What are some of the new strategies and practices required to stay competitive in this new economic environment?
Digital adoption has taken a quantum leap at both, organizational and industry levels. During the pandemic, consumers have moved dramatically toward online channels, and companies and industries have responded positively in turn.
Driving workplace experience through flexible infrastructure has been one of the key agendas. Enhanced voice technology – such as soft phones, Wi-fi upgradation, aligning workplace technology and office/branch design, more IoT-based smart sensors, virtual communication & collaboration (Skype/ Blue Jeans, troubleshooting & virtual contact centre) – are few of the initiatives taken towards boosting digitalisation.
How is Standard Chartered working towards balancing sustainability with safety in the post-pandemic era?
The Bank has committed to achieve Net Zero emissions from our operations by 2030, and Net Zero emissions from our financing by 2050. The methodology, split targets, and timelines are work in progress currently.
At Standard Chartered, our principle is to never settle, and we have seen an opportunity to make positive out of this negative. Mothballing spaces to optimize energy consumption is one of initiative taken to ensure limited employees coming to workplace were not utilizing all the floors with aircons operating throughout, but effectively utilizing portion of office space for focused work and collaboration.
UVGI lamps are installed in the air-handling units to ensure we address the bacterial and fungal presence in the premise and also get the tangential benefit of having clean AHU cooling coils with better efficiency of HVAC reducing the energy consumptions of the premises.
Aerowater machines were also implemented to generate potable water from moisture to dispense 1000 litres per day which was used to supply to all the locations in the city to address the water supply challenges faced during pandemic lockdowns. Hereby we continuously thrive to implement new initiatives and contribute to Mother earth.
How are companies now supporting the ‘work-from-anywhere’ culture?
Digital transformation and technology will impact future workers, their behaviour and therefore their workplaces. With most of our future workforce being independent of their work location, we will experience the opportunities and risks of being able to work from anywhere.
If we can work from anywhere, will we sit anywhere? Active working will enable workers to work from anywhere, but be supported at all times and simultaneously ensure maximum comfort and experience during their work — be it during a 3-hour meeting, another 2-hours of concentrated focus work or a quick catchup with colleagues.
Future work point categories would be:
- Unassigned focus work.
- Collaborative workshop zones
- Meeting zones
The premise of activity-based working is that the variety of tasks people perform is numerous and that these tasks are best supported by different working environments. However, despite these changes to workplace design, many of the seating options remain constrained to traditional approaches of task, meeting, and visitor. An “active working” solution is something that can effortlessly cross-over all these applications and recognises that its user may change throughout the day.