Interview with Simon Ward

Citation

(2010), "Interview with Simon Ward", Journal of Corporate Real Estate, Vol. 12 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/jcre.2010.31212bab.001

Interview with Simon Ward

Article Type: Talking heads From: Journal of Corporate Real Estate, Volume 12, Issue 2

by Debbie Hepton

Simon Ward joined Barclays Bank as Group Property Director in June 2009, based in London. He is accountable to the Group Financial Controller and the Group Finance Director for the overall real estate strategies and policies for the firm.

Previously, Simon was Global Head of CRES at Deutsche Bank, where he spent eight years. Initially, as Head of the EMEA region, he led a significant rationalisation of the real estate portfolio and the re-engineering of the CRES business in support of the Bank’s cost containment programme. He spearheaded the introduction of the Workplace Strategies Team, and also the Global and Regional Real Estate Committees. Simon became the Global Head of CRES in April 2004, and was latterly focused on developing the strength and depth of the CRES team and operating model in support of the Bank’s business agenda, whilst maintaining strict cost discipline. Prior to joining DB, Simon worked for JLW/JLL from 1988 through to 2000, first in the City Agency team until 1995 following which he moved over to what is now the Corporate Solutions Team, before leaving to join DB.

Simon is a qualified Chartered Surveyor and dedicated family man. He is a past President of the British Council for Offices and an active member of CoreNet Global.

Earlier in 2009 you joined Barclays as Group Property Director. How have you settled into this role? What do your day-to-day tasks entail?

I am really enjoying my new role at Barclays. There are a lot of very talented, ambitious, and pleasant people here. The Bank is driven by its desire to become one of a handful of universal banks leading the global financial services industry, helping our customers and clients throughout the world achieve their goals, and I feel thoroughly re-energized by that challenge.

My role as Group Property Director is split into two parts. First, as a Head of Barclays Property, I am responsible for the Group’s property strategy. This entails ensuring we have “joined up” real estate strategies for our major hubs and locations, and that any capital projects are aligned to those strategies. As the Group Principal Risk Owner for property, I am also responsible for ensuring that the operational corporate real estate and services (CRES) teams perform their tasks in accordance with the Group’s various policies and procedures that we apply to our property activities.

The second part of my role involves working with the leaders of the CRES teams to evolve a vision of what world-class CRE looks like for Barclays, and to work out how we are going to get there partnering together. We have already made quite good progress with this and have a clear set of objectives not only for 2010, but also for the next three to five years. It has been a great deal of fun getting this together and I am looking forward to working with many of my new colleagues to operationalize this vision.

How does this role differ from your previous position as Global Head of CRES at Deutsche Bank?

Many of the issues and challenges are the same for both banks. Deutsche Bank and Barclays are structured differently and the Barclays structure allows me much more time to think and operate at the strategic level.

What were your main achievements during your time at Deutsche Bank?

One of my key achievements was building a strong team. All of my former senior colleagues and I can be proud of the strength and depth of the team that we built. That includes not only the internal team but, also, all of the relationships and partnerships that we built with our Tier 1 and other vendor partners.

I would like to think that I will be remembered, more than anything, for building a team that had spirit and that, as a group of professionals, we enjoyed working with one another, were very committed to what we were doing, and executed superbly.

I was also pleased with the strong and pro-active focus that we were able to bring within the business to longer-term real estate strategies for our key locations, as opposed to just tactical deal-making in reaction to business need. To me, that is the crux of what a corporate real estate function needs to get right most of all; everything else it does is really in support of delivering and maintaining that.

We did a lot of work in terms of process improvement and standardization, and that is still very much ongoing. I was particularly pleased with the achievements in the project management space, as well as some of the progress we were making with workplace and sustainability which are obviously two of the principal issues that most large corporate real estate team are focused on today.

Continuing on from the first question, what obstacles and challenges have you faced during this early stage at Barclays, and what do you hope to achieve going forward?

In terms of obstacles and challenges, I would turn that around and say that I have had a very positive experience in joining Barclays, as I have alluded to already. The overarching feeling coming here is that I have joined an organization that is very receptive to change and continuous improvement as part of its ambition to become a world-class universal bank. The Bank’s Guiding Principals really say it all: winning together, best people, customer and client focus, pioneering and trusted.

What level of importance is placed on CRE strategy within Barclays?

As it was as Deutsche Bank, the principal of aligning what we do as a property function with the overall goals, objectives, and vision of the firm is a very clear one. In turn, within the CRE teams, those objectives are cascaded down to a personal level so that everyone can see the connection between their own personal annual objectives, training plans, etc. and the overall direction and vision of the firm.

In terms of CRE strategy within Barclays, property has now become part of the standing agenda at the quarterly Group Operating Committee meetings, which demonstrates how seriously senior management takes real estate matters.

Worldwide, from high-street branches to high-rise offices, Barclays occupies more than 4,000 buildings on a leasehold or freehold basis. What is Barclays doing to track and assess its energy and water consumption, as well as cost data, within its individual buildings as well as across the entire portfolio?

As part of our CSR strategy and specifically with regard to the Carbon Reduction Commitment legislation in the UK, we have been measuring our utilities consumption and costs. We are in the process of extending that initiative to all our significant buildings world-wide.

What role can the CRE strategy play in attracting and retaining employees?

Barclays takes the health and wellbeing of its staff extremely seriously, and I have started to work with the HR and CRES teams to think about how we increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the workplace at the firm.

As well as cost and efficiency, an effective workplace initiative can also help attract and retain staff by creating fit-for-purpose working environments that stimulate greater productivity and innovation. Specifically, we recognize that the bank is an amalgam of different businesses who have different demands of their people and, therefore, of their space. Practically, therefore, they work in different ways and thus CRE has to recognize that one size does not fit all.

There is no question that banks rely on innovation just as much as any other corporation, much of which comes as a result of intense collaboration and teamworking. So the ability to provide the right environment for teams to come together and collaborate is key.

I think we have a particular challenge with parts of the Barclays portfolio around enabling and supporting management in terms of inspiring their people. By that I mean that quite a lot of the portfolio seems “tired”. As part of looking at the workplace, I certainly feel we need to look at how we can make the space more inspiring for people to work in, as we seek to motivate and inspire our staff more generally.

According to an article in Telephony World, office use by corporate America is expected to decline by 40 percent over the next five years. How far do you agree with this, and do you think it is a global issue?

That is an interesting one, which plays to the workplace question that you have just asked. Logically, if we are going to create more efficient and more sustainable workplaces, then we are going to need less of them. As people travel less and use technology more to connect, and as we get better utilization out of the office space that we do have, that suggests that there will be, overall, less space required. So less space, yes. Whether it is as much as 40 percent less, I really would not know.

I still think there is a crucial role that the physical workplace will continue to play as regards team working and innovation. Yes, you can do some of that with technology – on the internet, etc. – but it is not the same as being face to face, working as part of a team and really getting the creative juices flowing in a way that people would recognize today. Logically, I think we will use less space. I think that we could also end up using space in a more distributed model. If you look at Barclays in the UK, we are certainly going to be looking at ideas for what I call a “micro-hub strategy,”, i.e. more local and regional use of space, so that people would perhaps need to come to the main or regional head office less frequently and otherwise working more locally.

You are an active member of the CoreNet Global and the British Council for Offices. What does this membership entail?

It entails getting together with your peers from time to time, but these organizations offer two different things for me. CoreNet gives me the opportunity to network with people who have a similar role to me and there is a particular part of CoreNet that I like which is the Discovery Forums. These are held regionally about twice a year – in the States, Germany, and the UK, etc. – and they gives CRE leaders the opportunity to sit down with about 20 like-minded people to catch up and compare notes on issues of the moment and what people are doing about it. It is a way of making sure that you are not out of touch or missing anything. It also builds a very useful network of people you can talk to. I have got some very good business friends within this network that I feel able to ring up and say “what are you doing about this?” or “can you tell me about what you are doing on that?,” so I think that works very well from a best practice perspective.

The BCO is predominantly focused on the UK market, although it does have wider aspirations in the future. It is predominantly a supply side organization – architects, engineers, developers, etc. The percentage of corporate occupier members is fairly low. Everyone talks about the customer being king and in reality the BCO is a great opportunity to engage with the supply side and tell them what you want and what you are thinking about for the future. It is no good, in my view, griping from the sidelines about service charges, or anything else that you are unhappy about. If you are unhappy about things or you want to influence things, then go and talk to the supply-side.

I have treated the BCO as an opportunity to influence the supply side positively, proactively, constructively and in a market – the UK market – that is one of the most advanced and sophisticated in the world and where a lot of what we do in terms of BCO specification et al. is in some way shape or form transmitted to many other parts of the globe.

The crux of it for me is that you can get very insular and myopic in the corporate world. I think it is desperately important to connect with the market-place and with other peers. The reasons for that are obvious in terms of best practice and of competitive edge, and – particularly with the BCO – of connecting with the supply side to maintain a dialogue about what we are looking for and how the supply side can provide that in the most efficient way. It is not a “nice to have” – it is a “need to have” series of relationships.

Speaking at a CoreNet Global meeting, best selling author Rowan Gibson highlighted that many corporate real estate executives would agree that cost cutting has gotten pretty close to the bone, and that “innovation is the only tool left in the toolbox.” What is your opinion on this?

A number of things come to mind: many organizations, particularly the larger ones, have squeezed space standards pretty much as far as they can go. They have also squeezed their vendor partners, in terms of facilities management (FM) service and project management service and cost. There will always be ideas about how you can streamline a process and therefore make things cheaper, and they will continue as one is able to Lean and/or Six Sigma processes or services. There will always be areas for improvement, but a lot of cost has been cut. It is surprising, though, how you can keep finding savings. I still think that there is probably a fair way to go yet in terms of the standardization of a lot of the services in the operational world. There is an opportunity for the Johnson Controls or CBREs of this world in the FM and construction disciplines to further standardize their service offering, because corporates – given the opportunity – will tend to specify a service very much to their own standard, whereas in fact a market standard should be perfectly acceptable.

However, in many ways corporates are more comfortable thinking about the revenue line rather than the cost line. One can directly influence the cost line quite quickly, which you need to when you lose control of the revenue line in an economic downturn. We have been through an awful lot in the last couple of years so people have had to look at cost, but more generally, innovation is something that organizations are thinking an awful lot about; whether that is new products or new ways of doing things and that is why a lot of corporations are very focused on getting “A” players into their organizations. They need to be a step ahead and innovating all the time. Banking is no different to the IT world. A new banking product probably has a shelf life of six months before the competition catches up, in the same way that something out of Nokia does. It is pretty similar in that respect.

I think that people would agree with that general assertion. Innovation is key, and CRE’s role is to enable people to network and collaborate so that they can innovate and invent, as I said earlier.

In your opinion, what are the most serious concerns facing real estate investors today, and are these the same across the globe?

The successful investor achieves superior returns. The world is becoming a smaller place, and although there is still a lot more transparency to come to many emerging markets, there is an awful lot more information, analysis, and research around. Gaining competitive edge for return – so that you are at least in the top quartile – must be the challenge that these people face. As the world becomes a smaller place, that becomes more and more difficult, because there is more information, markets become better known, etc. That has to be the challenge for them.

To end the interview on a lighter note, if you had the opportunity to have lunch with any business leader – past or present – who would it be, and why?

Since I am so exercised with the workplace and how we can transform it, I have been thinking about this more generally, which has made me look back into history. Quite often when you think you are in the midst of a new trend, you often find parallels from the past.

I have looked into the UK history at some of the examples of how staff were motivated and inspired in the past, and the one that springs to mind is the Bourneville model that George – and to some extent his brother Richard Cadbury – came up with about how they cared for their workforce, which to me is similar to the concept of health and wellbeing today.

So, George Cadbury – the senior partner in that relationship – would be the guy that I would love to have lunch with to better understand his thinking and philosophy in this whole area of how we look after and create a healthy, happy, and inspired workforce.