Workplace Change Management for Consolidation of Regional HQ – Case Study – Guardian Life
Workplace change management consulting for the consolidation of regional locations: A case study on insurance industry office transformations
How Guardian Life embraced workplace change management & successfully combined 5 area offices into a new regional campus.
Guardian Life Insurance Company approached Stegmeier Consulting Group (SCG) to provide workplace change management expertise for its consolidation of 5 locations and 1,600 employees into a new campus in Bethlehem, PA. The employees were accustomed to working in a cubicle environment, and design for the new office was open, collaborative, and offered activity-based work settings.
The new building comprises 281,680 gross square feet of space and was built on a thirty-one acre site. The office complex was built to be LEED-certified and was designed to adhere to the latest standards for energy efficiency. Its innovative design enhances work/life integration for employees, increases the ability to work collaboratively for the customers’ benefit, and promotes a flexible work environment. Features such as a town hall space, walk-up technology support center, walking trail, fitness center, and pantries on every floor were included as part of the design. The new space brings together employees from separate buildings located throughout the Bethlehem and Allentown communities, allowing for a more collaborative work environment that enhances client interaction and support.
Essential change management services pave the way for bringing regional offices together
SCG created and managed a robust change communication strategy, plan, and schedule for communications and activities leading up to the relocation. Our team was also engaged to develop corporate-branded communication content for the workforce, integrating components of the Guardian-on-the-Go (workforce mobility) toolkit being launched simultaneously.
SCG established a group of change advocates to represent the voice of their peers, led recurring working sessions with the group, and created a feedback loop to measure change readiness of each advocate’s respective group and to ensure new issues that arose would be addressed as quickly as possible. SCG facilitated the development of workplace protocols for the new, open work environment, and developed “A Day in the Life” train-the-trainer program with separate modules for leaders and employees.
A few months after end-users had settled into their new workspace, SCG provided a post-move measurement and a global comparison against the baseline metrics established at the beginning of the project. All data, findings, and lessons learned were then used to inform decisions relevant to additional workplace overhauls, including Guardian’s state of the art space in Holmdel, NJ.
Workplace change management services for your office consolidation project
Does this sound like something that could help your company navigate the waters of a workplace change? If you’re planning a corporate office move or are combining multiple locations into a new campus, don’t leave your transformation to chance; workplace change management is an essential component of the process. Take the first step by reaching out to Stegmeier Consulting Group through the form below.
