Is Your Outdated Office Space Holding Your Company Back?

There has been a lot published recently about the flexible working environment trend. It seems the days of what we know as the standard office layout are numbered. More and more companies are shifting to a model where employees don’t have their own office and in some cases they don’t even have their own desk.

With the advent of cloud computing employees can have access to everything they need without the burden of a bulky filing cabinet or even their own desktop. When employees need to come into the office they can come into a flexible office environment, sit down at any workstation and have everything they need by simply logging into the cloud. If they don’t need to be in the office they can utilize the cloud to work anywhere they have a data connection. This freedom to work from virtually anywhere has shown improvements in employee moral and productivity. The other benefit to employers is that flexible workspaces shrink square footage by shedding underutilized offices.

While shrinking square footage isn’t good for us in the commercial real estate business, we feel that our Pepperell Center is ideally suited for flexible office space. The high ceilings and wide-open space makes it very easy to design an open space with flexible workstations. We also have a fiber backbone that can support the cloud computing demands of almost any company in the area.

Going forward, trying to work with outdated non-flexible office space is going to present businesses with numerous challenges. Aside from the increased overhead for inefficient square footage and decreased productivity, employers with old fashion office space will struggle to attract and retain young talent. Employees aren’t going to want to stay with a company that doesn’t offer a flexible work environment. Large companies all over the county are shedding their outdated suburban campuses to migrate into more flexible urban office space. The main driver has been employee attraction and retention. Young talented employees want the flexibility that the modern office provides. Older employees that don’t want to embrace the flexible office environment are simply left by the wayside.

Skepticism from those who have spent their entire lives in a traditional office environment is understandable. It can be hard to imagine a world where the coveted corner office doesn’t exist. Those skeptics just need to look at how much technology has changed their business world in the last decade. It would be crazy to think that massive changes that have been brought on with technology wouldn’t have some effect on the office environment. The move towards the flexible office has been taking place in major metropolitan areas for years. With cloud computing now available to the masses there is no reason local companies can’t take advantage of the cost savings and increased productivity of the modern flexible office.

If you think your company could benefit from a more flexible office space please don’t hesitate to contact me. We can design and price low cost office space that will put your business in a position to succeed well into the future.

Will Kany
Leasing Director