With over 3800 employees — 44% of which are women — Synchrony Financial’s offices in Kavuri Hills’ iLabs are filled with colourful personalities to complement the equally engaging interiors with its signature ‘synchrony gold’- all designed by Pune-based design firm VAM Infrastructure.
Upon walking into Synchrony Financial’s (SF) brightly lit offices, you’re met with a diverse population of hard-working employees across the age spectrum— all smiling, focussed and dressed to the nines, and reflective of the trendy interiors speckled with motivational posters about teamwork and career goals, maintaining a peppy vibe by also integrating their corporate colour of synchrony gold, a move away from the typically sombre office colours of blue and grey.
HYDERABAD ,TELANGANA, 16/05/2017: E-library of Synchrony Financial in Hyderabad on Tuesday. --Photo: Nagara Gopal
The 70,000 square-foot space spread across three floors make for an easy flow between formal conference rooms equipped with state-of-the-art business suites and gadgets. Computer systems built into desks make for easy and de-cluttered meetings. Individual cubicles are strategically organised so that there is no suffocation to the workforce. Managerial cabins are designed with partially sand-blasted glass to ensure a two-way communication between employees and supervisors.
Cultural values
“The office concept is designed around engagement and care— two of our inherent cultural values,” Senior Vice-President and Business Leader Faisal Uddin shares, “From an engagement perspective, we have a lot of millennials under our umbrella, and one can’t keep talking to keep them engaged, you’ve got to leave them to their devices. By doing so, you create these nice spaces where they can go have some down time, whether it’s in our spa or our games room. Then there’s a concept where you place yourself as a guiding figure who listens to them and then you can create spaces, like our coffee conversations room, where dialogue is instrumental. The key thing is making it voluntary, because not everyone may want to talk to you. Some want to talk to you along with their families, because they’ve been here for a long time in an industry that is notorious for traction. We have employees who’ve stuck by us for ten to fifteen years— and they tend to see the company as a family. So we felt it necessary to create that openness.”
With the thrum of SF workspaces, the building also breathes green with its LEED: Gold Certification, ensuring they make the most of their resources through the three R’s — Reuse, Reduce and Recycle —cutting down on waste. This is evident in the colourful and constantly scrubbed down cafeteria, a place where employees stereotypically look miserable, but at SF they exude cheer.
HYDERABAD ,TELANGANA, 16/05/2017: Physically disabled persons on the job of premier Synchrony Financial in Hyderabad on Tuesday. --Photo: Nagara Gopal
SF’s offices are also disability-proficient, with strategically placed ramps and wide hallways, Faisal shares. He also shares SF has employed about 90 disabled employees in the last six months. “We got proactive about the inclusion of employees with disabilities, and created an infrastructure around it. I wouldn’t tell you that this site is perfect, given it’s around 16 years old and back then, the awareness wasn’t quite there. We couldn’t completely transform the place so we made some fixes and upgrades, such as changing up the rest rooms and common areas where the consciousness around disabilities would be very clear.”
On that note, Faisal explains, “Our company philosophy believes strongly in the capabilities and comfort of our employees. The whole tagline became ‘Engage with us,’ which encourages leaders to engage with the employees, for employees to engage with customers and with clients. And it’s not just about having a tagline, it’s about walking the talk.”
In a little over a week, however, Synchrony Financial will bid farewell to this progressive office space and throw open the doors to a new, larger space that will be 2 lakh square feet and strapped with more employee-friendly facilities than is currently at iLabs.
Synchrony Financial
What: Office Space
Where: Kavuri Hills
Area: 70,000 sq ft across 3 floors
