PLANO, Texas — Team members at Toyota Financial Services are still making the move to the captive’s new location in Plano, Texas — from Torrance, Calif. — but it seems many employees may be hired locally.
It has been two years since TFS announced it would join Toyota Motor Sales USA, Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America, and Toyota Motor North America in a single campus headquartered in the Dallas area. The project is currently under construction.
TFS currently shares a transition space with its Toyota affiliates, located less than two miles from the future campus — which is expected to be fully operational and affiliate partners in place by 2017.
The move from the transition space into the new campus “will take place in phases,” said Derrick Brown, media and public relations administrator at TFS. “We expect to start moving team members onto the new campus by mid-2017, with a goal of having everyone moved in by the end of the calendar year.”
To date, 173 TFS team members have made the move to the new location, and another 150 are expected to join before the end of the year, Brown told Auto Finance News.
However, this is only a small portion of the 900 employees — local hires and those relocated, combined — that TFS expects to have working in the Plano office. About 1,000 TFS employees “in good standing” at the company’s California headquarters were offered relocation and retention packages for the move to the Dallas suburb, Mike Groff, TFS president and chief executive, previously said.
“We have invited all team members, and want as many as possible to relocate, but we recognize that not everyone will be able to make the move,” Brown said. “Relocation will continue over the next 18 months or so, and we will also continue to hire locally whenever possible.”
The new headquarters is expected to bring about a more collaborative and interactive environment. “We are moving from a work environment where approximately 80% of the space was individual space and 20% was shared space, to about a 50/50 split,” Brown added.
“The space is ultimately designed to change the way we work — more transparent, more collaborative, more open, and more interactive,” said Julia Wada, TFS group vice president of human resources, real estate and facilities, and business technology solutions. “Our team members will have the opportunity to customize their day, moving in and out of different work spaces that best match their work tasks and work styles.”
Separately, TFS has implemented a Shark Tank initiative to encourage its team members to contribute “innovative ways to foster TFS’ driving principle of continuous improvement,” Brown said. TFS also hosts an annual Innovation Fair to showcase “ideas implemented by team members across the organization — both big, transformational projects and smaller, incremental ideas that improve the business in a measurable way,” he added.
