Working From Home Getting your Employees Down?
How Companies are leveraging a hybrid shared-office-space to encourage innovation and reinforce their culture while minimizing fixed costs and overheads
Throughout 2020, companies have been forced to re-examine and fundamentally change how they do business. Remote Working or Work From Home (WFH) has become the norm for a majority of organizations.
While for most, this has been a radical and unplanned change, companies are seeing the benefits in many ways. From a purely cost perspective, a remote working environment has highlighted the question of whether considerable investment in conventional physical office rentals (with the substantial associated fixed and variable costs) are really necessary. Going forward, Finance Departments are looking at whether there is a way to optimize this expenditure.
High profile employers like Shopify have decided to adopt a more flexible approach. More and more companies are jumping onboard, happily avoiding paying for scarce, expensive office space and overheads.
And people like it - a paper in the Journal of Urban Management summarizes findings where flexible office workspaces are associated with greater employee satisfaction and higher organizational commitment. The Harvard Business Review articulates the question nicely: Is it time to let employees work from anywhere?
But companies are also seeing the drawbacks. A wholly remote model presents some substantial challenges in encouraging innovation and maintaining a strong corporate culture. Companies need to find the right balance to support remote working with an established space where people can still meet and interact and feel part of the company’s community.
Innovation is more likely to happen in places where chance occurrences amongst different participants will lead to a kind of cross pollination of new ideas - which will then lead to greater innovation, better products and bigger and more sustainable companies. If companies no longer have a strong gravitational pull on their employees to be located in any one place, how can that organic process of meeting someone new, evolving your thinking and inventing something happen?
The importance of face to face interaction is unlikely to recede - and despite our increasing comfort with technology, business systems haven't evolved to the point where anyone can truly work from anywhere. There still needs to be a physical executive office location to anchor company culture and innovation. Making connections are a huge driver of employee identity in co-working spaces.
Building a company culture goes beyond simply having one physical location. It is important to have a dedicated (executive office) space, with an interior customized to the company and flexibility to adapt.
Large corporations are starting to see the benefits of a more flexible approach of a co-working office space. They have adopted a flexible approach building an effective shared executive office/ co-working space that balances a ‘people-centric’ space without requiring a massive capital outlay.
The companies that are getting it right are those that are saving on the cost of long-term rental agreements and ownership of properties while still providing an outpost for workers to collaborate and feel connected – and ultimately do their best.
The Services that ZEMLAR OFFICES provide companies, is an easy means to deploy a hybrid model enabling companies the flexibility from a cost perspective AND the ability to maintain a strong corporate culture and connection amongst employees. Companies could have the ability to fully customize their office space and make it their own across 10 locations in the GTA including Mississauga, Oakville, North York, Scarborough, Etobicoke, Richmond Hill, and Burlington.
Interested in Knowing more about ZEMLAR OFFICES Services? Please do not hesitate to contact +1 833 ZEMLAR 7 or visit www.zemlar.ca. Our team of associates will be more than happy to assist you with your requirements.