The Challenge
Of REA Group’s 1,300 local staff, 800 are housed at its Melbourne headquarters, with the balance covering the remaining capital city offices. While REA Group has a large salesforce, the majority of its people are in IT developer and engineering roles.
REA Group is a cloud first, mobile first employer with a fleet of laptops, mobile phones and tablets. Each individual hotdesk – with display, chargers, keyboard and a mouse at each workstation – is located within ‘neighbourhoods’ of function-based teams.
At the end of the day devices are either stored in employee lockers or taken home. In addition to a small number of desktops, there is a 50/50 split of 600 Apple & 550 Windows personal devices in REA Group’s fleet. Other assets also include Mac Minis running REA Group’s Zoom rooms and iPads inside and outside each meeting room to provide seamless room control, ad-hoc bookings and room availability.
“We’re a highly mobile operation – by nature and technology preferences – largely driven by the staff not having dedicated desks. We give staff a choice of device because they’re happier and more productive with choice. I can’t emphasise how powerful that is for staff,” says Fabian Serruto, Support Services Manager at REA Group.
“While we wanted to give them the tools they were comfortable with, we also realised that from administrative and cost perspectives the number of options had to be rationalised. We identified specific role types that are better suited to a particular platform and style of device,” he says. As an example, in the Apple space, REA Group offers staff 13” or 15” models of MacBook Pro with Touch Bar – the larger screens and higher performing models are better suited to developers and designers who often perform CPU-intensive tasks.
REA Group’s internal IT team are highly proficient and self sufficient. “In the Apple space we act as a Genius Bar for staff. But we needed to free ourselves from procurement and break/fix servicing.
“One of the goals with CompNow was to create an amazing customer experience for REA Group staff. That meant working together to make our processes as painless as possible – there are already enough challenges in the workplace!” he says.