Easing the commute

At Bristol-Myers Squibb they also involve the employees ' children in the ˜buy' decision. ˜We ask them to come and visit the area, because they are influencers in the decision too,' says Sunita Malhotra, director of HR at the firm's headquarters 10 miles south of Brussels. She explains, ˜When we moved from eight locations to one, completely new, location, we asked every employee about where they lived, the length of their commute, the transport they used and how accessible the new site would be.' She went on, ˜We had no relocation issues because we did good research and got any potential problems solved before we relocated .' Again, Bristol-Myers Squibb got involved in finding out the needs of their people and making that a part of their employment offer.

In other firms, getting employees deeply involved in fitting out the offices, or being given small budgets to ˜personalise' their workspace adds to the overall feeling of ˜they want me to be here.' An employee is far more likely to be committed to the job if they can bring even a small slice of their own lifestyle to work every day.

Into that debate come new ideas of what the ideal ˜office' should be. Many experts - architects and office space planners - say that for today's employee the less celebration of hierarchy the better. They believe that executive floors, corner offices and executive dining rooms function symbolically to heighten the separation between top management and ˜the rest'. An office that is built to separate, flatly contradicts stated corporate beliefs of openness and the breaking down of staffing levels. But today's employees see their lifestyle set in a classless meritocracy. Send other signals from your penthouse eerie at your peril.

A recent study by British Telecom found that workers on different floors of the same building had only a 1 per cent chance of meeting each other on any given day. If you are trying to get employees to interact, building physical and class barriers is not the way to do it.

And size of firm doesn't matter at all. Whether you have 50, 500 or 5,000 employees, meeting their needs is paramount. The compensation is that your efforts will be rewarded.