When the staff capacity of your building needs to double, corporates would usually have to build up or scale work stations down into smaller areas. Instead, in keeping with their new commitments, ABSA has figured out how to give their staff more space, while still drastically reducing the building’s overall carbon footprint.
As the largest building in their Africa portfolio, the ABSA Towers North refurbishment became an opportunity to figure out the logistics on a grand scale.
In keeping with Barclays Africa’s commitment to reduce energy consumption and therefore their carbon footprint by 19.4% by year-end 2015, the ABSA Towers refurbishment was conducted using innovative green building principles. “We took a holistic approach,” says Aveshen Moodley, vice-president of Corporate Real Estate Solutions, Africa. “When we upgraded we didn’t look at the energy of one particular area — we did an investigation into all mechanical systems and took it as a whole building approach.”
The water system was updated and lighting technology and air conditioning improved, resulting in baseline energy consumption reductions of 72%, 49% and 19% respectively.
“We also installed a 400 kWp polycrystalline Solar PV system on the rooftop, consisting of 1?358 panels covering an area of 2?716m2. This combination of ground and rooftop mount installation offsets 700 000kWh of energy and contributes to a carbon reduction of 700 tonnes of CO2 per year.”
But it was the mandate to accommodate more staff that really pushed the team to think out the box. The team decided to refurbish the space according to new, agile workflow principles. This layout not only allows staff to make individual decisions about where they would like to work, but in this case it is also better for the environment.
From bench work stations to a collaboration zone, meeting rooms, meeting pods and areas where break-out sessions can happen, the work area has increased from 1 500 to 3 400 usable work stations — reducing the work station footprint from 17m2 to 9m2, am energy reduction of 64% per person.
“Our colleagues have been incredibly responsive. They can engage with each other more freely because it’s an open plan office. Senior management and staff talk more to each other, often improving the time to make decisions.”
In 2014, combined with other projects, the refurbishment of ABSA Towers North has enabled Barclays Africa to decrease their absolute carbon footprint by 10.3% across the entire group.
“The entire team working on this project is responsible for such a fantastic achievement. We’ve set very aggressive targets for the next stage — and we’re going to meet them.”