With a background as Australia’s multicultural broadcaster, the principal function of the Special Broadcasting Service Corporation (SBS) is to provide multilingual, multicultural and Indigenous radio, television and digital media services that inform, educate and entertain all Australians. Informed by its special Charter, SBS’s purpose is to inspire all Australians to celebrate diversity and in doing so, contribute to social cohesion.
Across five television channels, SBS delivers a unique mix of Australian produced and international programs in more than 65 languages; bold, provocative programing for a younger demographic; a national free-to-air Indigenous channel, and on the subscription platform, the best of international movies and local, grass-roots arts and entertainment.
In 2011, SBS engaged Strategy to help develop a vision for its Sydney headquarters, to equip the organisation to address the challenges of media convergence and to leverage opportunities from the cross-platform offering of its flagship programs and services. The physical working environment needed to support SBS’s objectives of a collaborative and high-performance delivery focus.
Employees from the commercial divisions of SBS Media, Distribution and Subscription Television were successfully relocated in the Agile Work Place Pilot space in October 2013. SBS has since observed a measurable lift in the successful cross-divisional collaboration of teams around its strategic objectives and a marked improvement in the efficient sharing of skills and resources; all critical to its plan of continuously maximising the public value of investment in SBS.
All SBS employees have benefited from the creation of a new Content Hub and additional collaboration spaces in its atrium, transforming a tired, underutilised area into a state-of-the-art presentation space for a wide range of SBS internal and external events. The spaces have also been used as a backdrop for a number of SBS internal television productions.
“Building a physical work environment to support the agile and cross-platform way in which SBS delivers its programs and services was central to our broader plan to equip the organisation to continue effectively delivering on its Charter, and to implement new and innovative initiatives to secure our success in a competitive media landscape.”
Martin Wright, Manager Corporate Services & Facilities, SBS Corporation.