FEATURE
New Beginnings PwC’s new office building in Belfast may have been in the making in a pre-pandemic landscape, but it’s been built with the new hybrid working model in mind, Kevin MacAllister, Regional Market Leader, Northern Ireland, tells Emma Deighan.
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wC opened its largest UK office outside London in Belfast in midJuly. Merchant Square will be its new Belfast home and the site from which the professional services firm will grow its NI team. Boasting 200,000 sq feet, with capacity for 3,000 workers, the site is NI’s most sophisticated office to date. The professional services firm is the sole tenant of the building on Wellington Place: the nine-floor complex is Belfast’s biggest private sector office letting deal. It’s part of a major commitment by PwC to strengthen its regional offices and support local talent and businesses. Last month it also announced a £40m investment in developing an Advanced Research and Engineering Centre in Merchant Square, creating up to 800 jobs over five years. “We have this lovely new office, which is the best in Belfast. It’s a great place to work and our people are telling us it gives that real feelgood factor and for us, it’s the perfect setting to bring people back into the office for hybrid working,” Kevin begins. With a dedicated wellbeing space for live exercise classes including High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) and yoga, meditation pods, personal services for therapies including
physio, reflexology and manicures as well as a stunning roof terrace and a café/restaurant deserving of its standalone entity, Merchant Square is the stuff of corporate dreams. And the reception from employees has surpassed expectations. “We never anticipated being a virtual organisation when the pandemic hit. Merchant Square was always going to be a long term investment and commitment and nothing changed in our minds during the pandemic to make us think otherwise,” Kevin continues. “What we are ultimately working towards now is some kind of hybrid working. We won’t return to five days a week like before and the typical response that we’re getting is that our people want two days remote working and the rest from the office. And that’s probably the right answer.” With a demographic that favours a mid-20s age range, Kevin says it is imperative that the younger professionals return to the office for their own career development. He adds: “We’re not about presenteeism and there is no room for that working model anywhere today, but we believe that you learn by osmosis and working with other senior colleagues. It’s where you get that confidence and physical learning experience. This is about caring for the staff and not telling them what
to do but showing them how they can use their time in the office for their personal and professional development.” While the team, like many corporate cohorts, managed seamlessly in their home working environments and huge investments were made by PwC in technology to allow that, Kevin says, as the NI Market Leader, “we do feel responsible for making our people aware of the benefits of coming back to the office.” “There are genuine personal and professional development reasons why you should be making an effort to come back in,” he continues. “Long term remote working will, undoubtedly, stifle development. And what we will see is a shift in how we work in the office and how we work at home. “It’s that idea of a cocktail of things; that ability to access the office in a very flexible way.” He talks about the zoned areas in the new space, which includes standing rooms for quick discussions, booths for private telephone
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