Elsewhere: Corporate Campuses Recall Earlier Era


In the 19th century, some of the U.K.'s biggest companies moved their headquarters out of big cities to less expensive spots and built towns around them.

The bank is shuttering some of its urban offices in favor of a sprawling, fabricated site. The green campus of Gogarburn cost the bank ?350 million (¤515.5 million or $630.6 million) to build and is a 20- to 30-minute drive from central Edinburgh.

While common in the U.S., the corporate campus is just taking hold in Europe. RBS and British Airways are among a handful of U.K. companies that have created an out-of-city, self-contained headquarters with extensive conveniences. Continental Europe provides two more examples -- Spanish bank Santander Central Hispano SA and Norwegian phone company Telenor ASA.

The Gogarburn estate is more than half full, and by September it will be the workplace for 3,250 staff members. Employees will be able to shop at a Tesco supermarket, go to the pharmacy, doctor or dentist or work out and drop their children off at day care within the 40-hectare campus.

In the U.S., corporate campuses are everywhere. Software maker SAS Institute Inc.'s 77-hectare campus in North Carolina offers some of the most comprehensive services. SAS Institute bought thousands of hectares adjacent to the SAS Institute campus for employees to buy and build their homes, and there are now schools on campus.

Though RBS has no plans to follow SAS Institute in providing housing or schools, its architects liked U.S. bank Merrill Lynch & Co.'s New Jersey campus, which they visited as part of their research, and view Gogarburn as being similar in terms of what it provides.

The trend makes business and organizational psychologists in the U.K. recall the country's early 19th century, when present-day Unilever and Cadbury moved out of cities and built towns around their new offices.

In 1878, Cadbury brothers Richard and George moved their company from Birmingham to the 5.6-hectare Bournbrook estate. They created a town around the factory, dubbing it Bournville for a French twist, as French chocolate was widely regarded as the best at the time. They provided housing, medical facilities and education for their workers.

The town is still run by a foundation established by Cadbury, and the company maintains exercise and medical facilities for its Bournville workers. Like RBS, Cadbury chose the site partly because of its excellent transportation links -- then rail and canal, but for RBS, an international airport.

Also in the late 1800s, Unilever founder William Hesketh Lever built a so-called model village. While Lever's town of Port Sunlight charged workers high rents and was seen by some as paternalistic, companies with modern corporate campuses, RBS included, aren't seeking control.

"RBS doesn't think of their site as paternalistic. They just want to provide the best working conditions for their staff for retention purposes," said Brian Lightbody, managing director for Michael Laird Architects, which designed the RBS campus.

It is too early to tell whether the site will increase worker retention or aid RBS in the stiff competition for top banking staff in Scotland, where the financial-services industry is the third-largest employer, contributing about 7% to annual gross domestic product.

A study in May by the British Council for Offices found that improving offices can improve staff retention, but it didn't specifically examine the effect of campus-style offices on retention.

RBS officials said one of the reasons for the campus was to put bankers closer together to encourage people from different business units to meet more frequently in an informal manner, and that should help raise efficiency.

Academics aren't convinced, though. "Work on brainstorming has shown that frequent informal meetings produce a larger number of ideas, but that the number of high-quality ideas is about the same as you get with a smaller number of formal meetings," said Ian Donald, a professor of occupational psychology at Liverpool University.

Regardless of the effect on productivity and recruitment, RBS will cut costs simply by consolidating multiple sites.