National fit out and refurbishment specialist, Overbury, has delivered the new office of an award-winning UK retail bank.
Overbury has transformed the 8,000 sq ft office of Secure Trust Bank in Shirley, Solihull into a flexible and collaborative workspace for some of its head office support teams.
The first floor of the two-storey Yorke House has undergone a comprehensive refurbishment to create an activity-based environment, designed to promote agile working and employee wellbeing.
Secure Trust Bank acquired Yorke House in March 2019. The building, which is situated adjacent to the UK bank’s headquarters, has been designed specifically to support expansion plans and allows the bank to consolidate from other local rented accommodation.
Michele Clifton, account manager for office design at Overbury’s Birmingham-based team, said: “We are hugely excited to have delivered such an important project on behalf of an employer that is clearly committed to providing its people with a great place to work. Agile working is becoming more popular and is an increasingly attractive model for employees. This fit out represents a considerable investment by Secure Trust Bank in creating a series of impressive spaces that have employee wellbeing at their core and will allow people to choose the way they work. The design balances aesthetics and functionality with a seamless combination of focused and collaborative working areas that will ultimately lead to better productivity and support the bank in its continued success for years to come.”
Roy Aston, chief technology officer at Secure Trust Bank, said: “We recognised there was a need to move away from the traditional office model where every employee was allocated their own desk and we were wasting valuable resources on unused or over-sized meeting rooms. Instead we’ve allocated areas to teams, recognising that as we continue to work more flexibly, it’s rare for every team member to be on-site at the same time, meaning that we don’t actually need a desk for every employee.
“Overbury developed a good understanding of our culture and the approach we wanted to take in changing the way we work. The team was able to advise us on the best way of achieving our goals and the result is a spacious, open plan environment with a combination of fixed workstations, a choice of agile workstations, collaborative space and small rooms for private meetings. When we set out our requirements we realised that this was quite a break in tradition and that we needed to challenge ourselves as an organisation and as individuals with set ways of working. Overbury’s experience helped us in this regard and whilst it’s still early days, we are already benefiting from the approach.”
Secure Trust Bank was founded in the West Midlands in 1952 and provides savings accounts and lending products to nearly one and a half million consumers and SMEs. Successfully listed on the main market of the London Stock Exchange in 2016, the bank published profits in excess of £18.1 million for the first half of 2019.
Secure Trust Bank currently employs nearly a thousand people at eight locations across the UK and in 2019, Great Place to Work ranked the company 29th in its Best Large Workplaces and 14th in its Best Large Workplaces for Women listings.
Overbury is delivering a series of fit out projects for clients across the Midlands, including a £5 million office refurbishment at the former Leamington Spa headquarters of Wolseley and a £9.5 million state-of-the-art music institute in Brierley Hill on behalf of Resonance.
