No Longer Desk-Bound

By unchaining employees from their desks, Bank of America is seeing a rise in productivity.

Image: File

While his peers uptown take five for an afternoon cigarette or coffee, Bank of America’s Don Addison takes a football break.

Addison stops working every day at 2:30 p.m. to take his son to football practice at Nation Ford High School. At other times of the year, he might knock off to coach rugby or meet his wife for a lunch date. He makes up for it by checking work-related emails before dawn from home, finishing tasks in the evenings, or planning future BofA projects at an empty conference table at 7 a.m. on a Saturday.

“I wouldn’t be able to do all that if I was chained to a desk uptown,” Addison says.

He is one of 3,700 BofA employees in Charlotte who have forfeited their cubicle and enrolled in My Work, a company initiative that encourages individuals to work on their own schedules either from home or at a My Work center in suburban areas around the world.

The Charlotte-based bank piloted the program here five years ago. Since then, My Work has expanded globally and includes about 19,000 of BofA’s 283,000 employees.

The program is designed to encourage employees to work where they’ll be most productive while maintaining a healthy work-life balance. It’s been so popular that the bank expects to have nearly 40,000 employees participating—more than twice the current enrollment—in two to three years.

“The demand is huge,” BofA’s Global Workplace Planning executive, Dan Boutross, says in an interview. “And in 2008 and 2009, it just exploded.”

My Work isn’t strictly a work-from-home program or a telecommuting effort. It’s a combination of work-from-home, traditional desk time, and group meetings to encourage employees to find a work environment and schedule that makes them most efficient.

“We are promoting productivity,” Boutross says. “That’s the secret sauce.”

For more on Bank of America's My Work program, click here for the full story from the Charlotte Business Journal (subscription required).