[Photo: HablassInteriors, WordPress]

Swiss banking giant UBS is looking to change the way employees view their relationship with their work spaces.  In its newly opened building at 5 Broadgate in central London, many of UBS’ employees will no longer be tied to the same desk every day with a telephone and desktop computer. Instead, the company has deployed so-called thin desks throughout the building.

Phone handsets were replaced by personal headsets, and employees can log onto their virtual desktops on computers at any desk in the building or at home. There are no laptops to lug around, and their phone numbers follow them from desk to desk or to their mobile devices.

“For me, it’s opening up and allowing people to work in different ways on whatever project, whatever activity they’re working on,” said Andrew Owen, managing director for UBS group corporate services in London. “Being chained to a desk in a singular environment is restrictive.”

Employees have a small amount of filing space and a locker where they can keep any personal items they might use during the day. (Larger caches of documents that are held on paper for the longer term can be retrieved from an off-site location within 2 hours.)

The elimination of fixed desks is not a new concept - it has proved particularly popular among technology companies and start-ups - but only in recent years has technology made it more viable for larger companies. It is still a rarity, however, in investment banking. Citigroup is one of the few companies that has a similar setup, at its new headquarters in downtown Manhattan.

And the practice has not yet infiltrated all aspects of UBS’s business. The trading floors at UBS in London still have a more traditional setup, with groups of employees heading to the same set of desks each day to view 3 or 6 screens of trading data. But that could change in the future. “The trading desk is our next port of call to achieve user mobility,” Ashley Davis, managing director for the UBS corporate center in London, said.

By having a more mobile setup for its employees, UBS believes it is able to use its real estate more efficiently. The company is using a ratio of one available desk for every 1.2 employees who work in the new building in London. More than 6,000 people will ultimately work there; about 89% have moved in so far.