An early adopter of Microsoft Teams, Nationwide Building Society has logged over 2.5 million video calls a month between staff working from home during the Coronavirus lockdown.
The first UK financial institution to roll out Microsoft Teams in 2019, Nationwide says usage of the platform has soared by 3000 percent over the last full month before lockdown began.
The platform has been used to maintain a line of communication between the Society's 12,000 staff working from home and those deployed on the ground in the branch network and call centres.
As well as a providing a forum for emergency meetings, video calls have been used to support the continuation of learning and development through virtual training sessions, hosting daily scrums for Agile Squads and delivering product updates.
Patrick Eltridge, chief operating officer at Nationwide, says: “Having Teams in place prior to Covid-19 has ensured we could react to lockdown rules very effectively as we prepared the organisation for new ways of working. Teams has enabled us to convene large groups of people in a way that isn’t possible in a meeting room. It’s not a contingency service for us but something we will continue to build on in the future - it’s a genuine extension of our effectiveness."
With the recently announced opening later this year of a new digital hub at The Post Building in Holborn, London, all its meeting rooms will be fully integrated with Teams, says Eltridge, enabling remote workers to join physical meeting rooms virtually. In the coming years, he adds, the ambition is for every meeting room at Nationwide to b equipped for video interaction, as the Society presses ahead with plans to offer more flexibility and choice to staff over working patterns and routines.