The BBVA paves the way for better digital workplace expectations for talent everywhere

This article was written and published in Spanish and has been translated into English via Google Translate. Click here to read the original article.

BBVA has presented to its employees in Spain a new productivity and reconciliation plan with which the financial institution hopes to promote a change in the way of working.

Under the motto 'Work better. Enjoy your life', the plan includes initiatives that promote a more flexible and balanced work environment, which guarantee equal opportunities and professional development for all employees, based on results and not on presentism.

In the act of presenting the plan to employees, held in BBVA City, headquarters of the entity, Carlos Casas, Global Director of Talent and Culture, said:

“We want to reinforce key principles of our organization: work for objectives, to be more productive and efficient, to offer greater flexibility to our employees and to reconcile our professional life with personal life.”

The plan includes initiatives that fall into two broad areas. On the one hand, good practices to achieve an efficient use of time, and on the other, more visible measures among which are the digital disconnection and the closure of the bank's corporate headquarters in Spain after 19 hours. The services provided in corporate buildings (catering, transportation, gym, etc.) will be adapted to this schedule.

Additionally, to favor employee mobility and make it more sustainable, BBVA will increase the number of buses from the BBVA City to the center of Madrid, promote the use of the shared car and create parking areas for eco-efficient means of transport, such as electric scooter.

Log of the day and digital disconnection

Within this new productivity and reconciliation plan is the hourly record in Spain. At the end of September, BBVA was the first Spanish financial institution to reach an agreement with the unions on the registration of the day - mandatory since the approval in March of Royal Decree Law 8/2019 - an agreement that goes beyond the approved regulations and which includes the aforementioned right to digital disconnection.

For the implementation of the registration of the day, BBVA has developed an application in which each employee in Spain must register their start and end times for each workday.

As for the digital disconnection, employees will not be obliged to be connected once their workday has ended or during the holiday period. In addition, no communications will be sent between 7 pm and 8 am the following day, with justified exceptions.

The excess of meetings is one of the great brakes to productivity, so this plan also seeks to effectively manage them, incorporating rules such as defining their duration to a maximum of 45 minutes, avoiding the use of unnecessary presentations, encouraging the use of videoconferences or share the objectives of the meeting in advance - with justified exceptions for these as well.

Agile technology and methodologies, which BBVA started adopting in 2014, also make it easier for the teams to be more focused on results and for the objectives to be clearer, thus favoring flexibility.

This productivity and reconciliation plan will be gradually implemented in all the geographies in which BBVA is present, adapting to the needs and characteristics of each country.

This article was written and published in Spanish and has been translated into English via Google Translate. Click here to read the original article.

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