Veldhoen + Company
As the founders of Activity Based Working, Veldhoen + Company has worked with innovative, forward-thinking clients on over 300 projects, worldwide, throughout our 30-year history. We consider each of our projects to be an amazing learning opportunity for us and our clients to contribute and learn from one another to achieve remarkable outcomes.
About Iolanda Meehan
As Partner Veldhoen + Company Asia, Iolanda brings 20 years of business management and HR expertise, marketing and strategy alignment with ways of working, to customers who want to truly transform how their organisation performs and to empower their employees to thrive.
Q
A
DFocus
耘申科技
Iolanda Meehan
Veldhoen + Company
亚太区执行合伙人
PART I
DFocus: Within the past few years, ABW has gained lots of attention in China. As the pioneer in ABW consultancy, what is your main focus when helping companies implement an ABW environment?
The ABW concept study in Europe has been around for around 30 years. In the last 5 to 6 years, we are seeing more and more interest from Asia-based companies, especially China-based companies.
PART II
DFocus: Veldhoen + Company has implemented hundreds of projects globally. What industries are key targets for ABW Transition?
About 10-12 years ago, we saw big up-take of activity-based working in the financial services sector e.g. banks and insurance companies. And it was not because it was trendy in the industry but also the industry was facing fierce competition in regard to talent attraction. So, changing the way people work, changing the environment that you offer, giving a higher degree of autonomy to your employees became a way to attract talent.
In the last 5-6 years, we have seen quite some interest from pharma and medical devices companies. ABW is not any more relevant for this industry compared to others, but again pharma and medical device industries were facing quite some talent competition, since they started to compete with the tech organization for talent. More pharma companies started to embrace activity-based working to attract the right talent, to retain them and to drive more innovation. Actually some of the leading pharma companies we have worked with have embraced the activity-based thinking holistically, and are currently running deep organization and culture changes fueled by the principles of distributed teams, empowered employees and trust – which are very much sourced in the activity-based philosophy.
We also work with government, institutions, hospitals and city councils. So I would not say there is one industry which fits activity-based working better than others. Because there is no one formula. The formula of activity-based working is very organizational specific.
PART III
DFocus: Veldhoen + Company has implemented hundreds of projects globally. What industries are key targets for ABW Transition?
About 10-12 years ago, we saw big up-take of activity-based working in the financial services sector e.g. banks and insurance companies. And it was not because it was trendy in the industry but also the industry was facing fierce competition in regard to talent attraction. So, changing the way people work, changing the environment that you offer, giving a higher degree of autonomy to your employees became a way to attract talent.
In the last 5-6 years, we have seen quite some interest from pharma and medical devices companies. ABW is not any more relevant for this industry compared to others, but again pharma and medical device industries were facing quite some talent competition, since they started to compete with the tech organization for talent. More pharma companies started to embrace activity-based working to attract the right talent, to retain them and to drive more innovation. Actually some of the leading pharma companies we have worked with have embraced the activity-based thinking holistically, and are currently running deep organization and culture changes fueled by the principles of distributed teams, empowered employees and trust – which are very much sourced in the activity-based philosophy.
We also work with government, institutions, hospitals and city councils. So I would not say there is one industry which fits activity-based working better than others. Because there is no one formula. The formula of activity-based working is very organizational specific.