Telco trends: to HQ or not HQ?

I have spent much of my life in one corporate office or another. Amsterdam, Paris, London, Zürich, Cupertino, Shenzhen… a bit like being at an airport, it doesn’t matter where you are, the vibe is strangely consistent. People running around from meeting to meeting with lengthy Powerpoint documents. Catching the lift just before the door closes. Queueing for coffee. Bagging the last available desk if you’re lucky. And a decent chair if you’re even luckier.

I must admit, I love it all. Fantastic people, interesting conversations, the “this is where it’s at” feeling of working together and getting things done. But with two years plus of not operating this way, I have to ask myself, do companies really need these big central spaces?

For employees, the situation seems pretty cut-and-dried. With COVID having given many of us the remote working lifestyle that the telco people (me included) talked about for years, there hasn’t exactly been a huge rush to go back to the way things were.

According to an article in?Forbes, 70% of employees say working from home is a top criterion for their next job, and 72% of executives reported that their organizations have started adopting permanent remote-working models. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s latest?future of work report?cites several surveys that show employees’ preference for hybrid work (even valuing flexibility with their work location over percentages of their salary). This is something companies like?Apple?learned to their cost when they tried to mandate people coming back to the office.

These challenges aside, it’s difficult to know when “just right” tips over into “too much”. Tesla has a massive (and beautiful) base in California, but few in-country headquarters. Trying to find the local base of streaming stars like Spotify and Netflix is even more of a challenge. In the end, the business model and product are going to define where you need that cozy executive floor.

Thinking about the telecommunications industry, there tends to be a split between domestic and multinational players. International companies typically have multiple bases: one mega headquarters, one in each country to oversee local operations and – just to make things more complicated – maybe the odd HQ running a particular geography or business unit. Conversely, single country operators are more likely to focus on one main location.

Trying to use a product-based strategy is also a problem. In one sense it’s global, in that just about everyone has a smartphone or broadband, wherever you are. On the other hand, local considerations like regulations and the overall network infrastructure – not to mention your shops and customer services – have a huge influence. Some operators like Vodafone believe it’s possible to run a multi-country telco from one central point, while others such as Singtel and Three do everything by country. Then there are operators like Telefónica, who do a bit of both.

I’m going to put it out there that telco decisions are best taken as close to the source of your frontline staff as possible, and that we should be getting rid of these big Starship Enterprise-style headquarter spaces.?

It might feel counterintuitive and expensive to the biggest operators, because you’d essentially be reinventing the wheel in each place.??But – the big advantage is securing more skilled and motivated local teams, as well as dedicated investment. Accountability and decision making are closer to customers and their pain points, making it easier to solve problems. This becomes even more relevant when you are up against local incumbents and challengers like Elisa, Sunrise, and Masmovil, who don’t have the distraction of an international HQ with its “universal” rules and peculiarities.

I would even go further. Focus on local first and put your headquarters in a shop (ok, it would need to be a pretty big one), a call center, or with your network operations. That way you would have no option other than to prioritize your field staff and keep your org structure as flat as the proverbial?pancake.

Despite taking the same decisions several times over, overhead costs would more than likely end up lower. In a way, it would be like the Swiss tax system, where different cantons make their own decisions about everything from energy supplies to schoolbooks and yet the tax rate is lower than many other countries that have a single, centralized tax system.

Am I just dreaming, or could it really happen? The only thing I know for sure right now is that I won’t be setting up a headquarters at home. That can go really wrong, as employees at one?American startup?discovered.???

I’ll leave you on that note!

Photo credit:?Mauricio Feldman-Abe, Pixabay