How to let go of your old supplies and mindsets during office moves
When Trish Callon rejoined Sun Life Financial after more than 20 years following other pursuits, her first thought was that “everything looked exactly the same. Except, wow, there’s a lot more paper than I remember.”
That was in 2014. Since then, the decades-old office on Toronto’s King Street has pulled up stakes and moved a kilometre south to a new “agile” workspace at 1 York St. And with that came the chance to transform their operations, says Callon, senior vice-president and general counsel. “We realized we had an opportunity to design a new building from the ground up, including converting to digital. It was a catalyst for change for the legal team. It caused us to sit back and think about how we were operating, and how we could modernize the way we work in a different space.”
The first step, she says, was trying to understand what the team needed in the new space. “The old offices had a very traditional setup with offices on the periphery, administration and law clerks in interior offices, and windowless meeting rooms.”
But their thoughts went well beyond the physical layout and workspace configurations. As a legal team, a major challenge was that “ton of paper” that had accumulated over 30 years. “We simply had an outdated matter management system. There was no digital aspect to it at all. We had to step back and understand the technology and process aspects associated with that,” Callon says.
The upside was that the legal team had a year and half before the move to plan the transition. So it set up various work streams around areas such as logistics, floor design and process streamlining.
Their first order of the day was tackling the physical aspect of reducing the existing paper load. “We made some strategic decisions about what to store and what to digitize,” she says. “If we were in the middle of a lawsuit during the move, it made sense to keep the paper. Anything with a different timeline we scanned or stored. We just did a better job of culling and digitizing before the move.”
With those steps alone, the Sun Life legal team reduced the number of paper files by 78 per cent, lowered the number of file drawers from 1,004 to 225, and sent more than 1,100 boxes of records and files to off-site storage.
It also donated 95 drawers of office supplies to schools and charities, and disposed of 10 bins of old electronics and batteries.
Processes were also put under the microscope to ensure they could keep the paper load at bay in the new space. For example, by streamlining and automating invoice payment functions, they reduced paper usage for the department by 85 per cent, delivering a 50-per-cent productivity improvement.
Equal scrutiny was paid to such functions as ordering of office supplies, digitizing trademark and domain name applications, cutting mutual fund prospectus renewals from three a year to two, and enabling electronic booking for meeting rooms.
Less paper also meant fewer printers. The floor now has a limited number of communal printers that require a user swipe a card to print. Documents are mapped to each person’s computer based on their employee ID number.
With the new open and collaborative office design, Callon says people have less space to store things. But between the digitization and the reduced storage options, everyday behaviour has changed for the better. “Now teams walk around with only their laptops rather than paper files. All the meeting rooms are wired. They can edit documents on screen and take notes on their laptops. It has helped us change our behaviour, which is remarkable, because lawyers tend to like our paper.”Callon says that now they have settled in, everybody is on board with the new way of doing things. “Some of what we did sounds like a blinding strike of the obvious, but we had sufficient time to think about and plan this. People saw this as an important and invaluable piece of work. It was a huge change-management effort, but it’s been a huge success and people are really embracing it. In fact, some of the folks who were understandably expressing a lot of concern are now amongst our biggest supporters.”