Grosvenor hunts for its Post-It note moment

Hema Selvaraj wants her new colleagues at Grosvenor Britain & Ireland to start thinking a little more like the team at Minnesota-based conglomerate 3M. There, staff are encouraged to set aside 15% of their work time over a week to “pursue innovative ideas that excite them”. The approach has led to products including the Post-It note, developed after a 3M scientist accidentally invented a glue that stuck lightly to surfaces without bonding fully to them. [caption id="attachment_1002074" align="alignright" width="150"] Hema Selvaraj[/caption] Selvaraj joined Grosvenor as its first innovation director last month. A retail specialist who has worked with companies including Tesco and The Disney Store, she now wants to help the team at Grosvenor to start thinking more freely about ways in which they can shake up the business, which owns swathes of Mayfair and Belgravia in west London. In doing so, she hopes, they may even come up with Grosvenor’s own Post-It note-like breakthrough. “I keep telling people that when you think of innovation, you end up thinking of Google and Amazon and Space X,” Selvaraj says.  “But actually, innovation happens every day. If something is becoming easier, simpler or leaner because of your actions, then you’ve been innovative, you are an innovator as well. That’s the ethos I’m trying to support here.” A fresh approach Selvaraj’s colleagues admit that the company has not always encouraged staff to think about how they can help change the business, its properties or processes. But at an offsite board meeting back in 2016, the team started to question “how might the world evolve and how would we respond”, says Sam Monger, director of strategy and research for the UK business. With the rise of companies such as Airbnb and WeWork, there was a sense that expectations might be moving faster than Grosvenor’s ability to keep up. “We’ve been quite lucky that we’ve owned the land we own,” Monger says. “We’ve not had to do much thinking about, for example, pre-letting of offices in Mayfair because generally the vacancy rates are so low you can rely on an ‘if you build it, they will come’ approach. “There’s just a general sense that that might not apply going forward, because people would get used to the much more customer-oriented services that some of these other [companies] were able to provide.” Since that meeting in 2016, Monger and colleagues have been busy formalising Grosvenor’s response. Late last year the company launched a concierge service to help independent traders set up their own shops, as an initial test of whether there could be new ways to help businesses operating on the estate. The company also worked with James Bidwell and his team at consultancy Re_Set to map out how the hunt for innovation could be embedded in the business. “How do you introduce an approach to innovation within a very established business, in an industry which frankly does not have a strong track record in innovation?” Monger says of the task that faced them. “Look at the amount of budget that goes towards R&D in real estate compared to a lot of other sectors. It’s very small traditionally. And that extends into the construction supply chain.” Low cost, fast execution In the months following the launch of the retail concierge service, Grosvenor has set up a rotating secondment of two members of staff to act as “innovation accelerators” in the business. Selvaraj’s arrival to lead that effort marks the first dedicated member of staff for the drive. The company has put out a call for new business ideas from across the group – of 130 responses, 27 are currently being worked on. They include new initiatives in the retail, residential and office spaces, Selvaraj says, as well as commercial suggestions around, for example, making the group’s legal contracts “less clunky”. Selvaraj says her past experiences in retail and e-commerce have prioritised moving quickly and looking for fast proof of a project’s value. “The idea is low cost, but fast execution,” she says. “And if we’re going to fail, let’s fail fast and learn from it. I think culturally that’s different to the way that Grosvenor’s operated until now.” There will be a new drive to gather and use data more effectively across the estate, and to open a more efficient dialogue with the thousands of people living and working across it. “Our relationships on the office side tend to be with the one person who signs the lease, or pays the rent, or rings up if something’s not working,” Monger says.  “But there’s a whole bunch of people working in those offices who shop in our shops and visit our places and are a big customer base for other parts of our estate. Yet we really don’t know that much about them. “We’ve got plans as part of this to get under the skin of that population. Across Mayfair and Belgravia there’s about 8,000 residents and about 50,000 workers on a daily basis. That gives you a sense of how important they are to the success of our places.” Grosvenor is also lining up a hackathon with Imperial College to explore ideas to help it meet its sustainability goals.  The UK business has committed to achieving net zero carbon operational emissions from all of its directly managed buildings by 2030. Selvaraj says the sustainability push was one of the reasons she was keen to join the company. “It’s refreshing to see sustainability goals written down so clearly in such absolute terms,” she says. “If I get to play even a small part in facilitating this, I think it’s a life well lived.” Monger adds: “To get to the sort of [emission] levels we need to, we are going to have to work very closely with our supply chain on how we innovate, how we work together to get embodied carbon out of the materials that are used in our development. “And then how do we work with our supply chain and our tenants to drive our operational energy over time? There’s all sorts of areas where we’re going to need to innovate, working with those other groups, which is going to become a bigger feature next year.” Old and new As the company announces projects to come out of the innovation team, Selvaraj hopes her new role will help bring Grosvenor into a new era without losing its historic character. “I’m fascinated by the fact that the company has successfully married the heritage values with modern values,” she says. “It’s still relevant.  “It’s still commercially viable. It’s still here and it’s getting better. I wanted to be part of that story.” For Monger, who has worked at Grosvenor for the past eight years, there is room for a shift in how the group is perceived.  In a few years’ time, he says, if someone in the company is asked to describe it, he hopes that “rather than saying we’re a landlord or property company”, they mention instead its broader impact on the local community – “less focus on the physical attributes of buildings and more on what is happening there, and how we are making life better and easier for people”. Now that’s a goal you can put on a Post-It note. To send feedback, e-mail tim.burke@egi.co.uk or tweet @_tim_burke or @estatesgazette