Is it time to give up the office?

It’s July. We are in the middle of Covid-19. Our office lease is up. What now? 

With employees working from home (WFH) and doing a great job, what do we do with the office lease? Stanley and I have spent several weeks looking at options for SDA. This is what we decided…

What we have learned about working remotely

We looked at our staff and our needs and tried to determine what corona has taught us thus far. Stanley had already instituted remote work capabilities, so that part was already in place. We were already paperless, so that was another box we had already checked off. And now the COVID-19 quarantine had forced us all to go home. What we found out is that our staff has done an excellent job adapting, and now they hope we can keep WFH in some way even after corona passes. But do we give up the office or do we keep it? We looked to our business mentors for advice and found out that maybe a hybrid work schedule is a perfect combination. 

Team members working from home with no other options sometimes struggle. Things happen at home, and your home life changes and the situation changes every week. Maybe Aunt Laurie has come to visit and now wants to stay longer in the extra bedroom/home office? Perhaps a child has gotten sick, or a house repair is distracting enough to make it harder to focus on work. Maybe you need some quiet time to stamp out some work. Sound familiar? These things happen, and if there is no other workspace, Starbucks or Waffle House is not the answer. 

Looking into shared spaces

One option we entertained was a shared space, and we saw several we really liked:  ROAM (first choice), Regus, Peachtree Offices, Serendipity Labs, Industrious, Switchyards and Intelligent Offices. Those options ended up being too expensive for a dedicated office and too much hassle to ask staff to bring in laptops and monitors necessary for our jobs into a shared space once or twice a month just for the sake of being together. But we liked the Dunwoody ROAM enough to use it on a per diem basis for occasional meetings when we all need a change of scenery. In the future, we are not ruling out a shared space. Rates may become more flexible for small business owners, and we will watch and see how things change in the future.  

So, what did we do? We renewed the lease on our office and converted the largest open room into our own shared space with several new workstations and docking stations that any of our team members can use. We rented out a back office to reduce overall costs and advertised it on Craigslist, Dunwoody Crier, and Liquidspace.com. Through Craigslist, the room rented out in a week. We still have a reception area, conference room, full kitchen, and the benefits of signage and a central location for office equipment, which seems to be a win-win for us right now. We have clients who still prefer to meet us at the office, and we want to continue to meet their needs. Overall, having an office lends stability and credibility that we are not yet ready to give up.

Keeping collaboration

For our staff, we still need to be able to collaborate as a team and have face to face interaction with each other, and Zoom is excellent for this. We began doing daily updates through Zoom, and it has worked well. We strongly recommend this if you have remote team members. It is also suitable as a short-term solution for larger staff meetings, but not always. We like being able to gather easily in a relaxed office environment when we need to. And for some employees, working from home exclusively can make some feel too isolated with not enough social interaction. We think this hybrid approach gives everyone the best of both worlds.

Flexibility is key

For scheduling, we gave employees the option to choose which days they want to work from home and when they want to come in. This is working well. We don’t have a crystal ball to  know how the business world will look post-COVID 19, but we think that giving staff work flexibility is a step in the right direction in being able to change as the times change in the business environment. 

I hope by sharing our research, you can take and add to it as you make your own decisions.  Small businesses are the lifeblood of the economy – what we do matters. 

As always, call us if you need us.

– Kelly