An office is a place where your team spends at least 40 hours per week. Unless you include sleeping hours into the equation, you’ll get to the fact that they spend more time at the office than at home. This means that office choice influences the quality of your lifestyle in more than a few ways. Other than that, it also affects the reputation of your company and the productivity of your team. All of this combined means that the choice of the right office space might just be one of the most important business-related choices that you’ll have to make. Here are a few tips to help you get the most out of it.
The location
The first thing you should think about is the location. This is due to the fact that the location affects two incredibly important factors: the cost of rent and the reputation of a company. The same company, with exactly the same marketing and exactly the same business model, looks different in the eyes of their clients, competitors and partners depending on the location of their headquarters. A company set in an industrial zone and the one set downtown aren’t looked upon the same. With greater prestige, however, comes greater renting cost. Therefore, the choice of location may be seen as a matter of marketing, as much as it’s a logistical or an infrastructural cost.
The size of the space
The next thing you need to consider is the size of your future office space. Why? Well, due to the fact that if the place can’t take your entire staff with all the necessary equipment, it’s simply not adequate, regardless of the price or the location. Sure, some may argue that in the age of the virtual office you can easily allow a portion of your staff to work from home or even pay some of them a seat in shared office spaces. Nonetheless, the availability of these offices depends on the region that you decide to work from. For instance, while it’s easy to find a reliable serviced office in Melbourne, further away from a major business hub this might not be the case.
Unfortunately, all of the above-listed works in a scenario where your business doesn’t grow or expand. When you take this factor into consideration as well, you’ll soon realize that you need to take a somewhat bigger office than you currently need. How much bigger? Well, that depends on your growth rate, as well as how quickly you expect to start bringing in new employees. In some scenarios, subleasing is an option, yet, at other times, this won’t be a viable option due to the fact that the landlord might forbid this in the original contract.
Proximity to public transportation
The next factor to weigh in is the proximity of your office to public transportation. As a company that wants to market itself as a green one, they need to provide their staff with means to make the commute eco-friendly. The problem with this theory lies in the fact that you simply can’t make your staff walk, cycle or carpool to work. You can encourage it, sure, but you can’t penalize or scold them for refusing to take this route.
The best you can do is provide them with an easy access to public transportation and offer a tad bigger reimbursement for using this method than is customary. Also, the term nearby or close by is quite relative. For someone, a 10-minute walk is more than acceptable while for others, this would be too great of a distance to even start considering.
Business type and infrastructure
The last thing you need to bear in mind is the infrastructure of the building. We’re talking about the broadband coverage, phone lines, access to roads and much, much more. Keep in mind, nonetheless, that while most of this may sound fairly basic, it’s not as common as you may think. Moreover, if your business has specific infrastructural necessities, like a larger warehouse or an area where you can fit production equipment and similar machinery, the search is even more complicated. Specific tools may be completely invaluable and essential to your business. So, if you can’t find a way to fit them within your new office, you might want to consider another option.
Conclusion
Of course, no guide can be elaborate enough to cover every single aspect for choosing an adequate office space. Still, for someone picking their first office space, the above-listed four should be more than enough to help you make a mental image of what you’re looking for.