Entire floors of office space are laying dormant in Calgary, victims of falling oil prices and a shrinking workforce. That empty space hurts the bottom line of both tenants who don’t fill their space any longer and landlord who can’t anyone to fill their buildings. On the flip side, markets in Toronto and Vancouver are finding an increasingly tight market where rents are soaring, in one report anticipating 50% increases in the next three years. Whether you’re on the boom or bust side of the cycle, the roller coaster of vacancies and rental rates is not going to flatten any time soon, so what can business leaders do to mitigate the damage?
plan to use less space
In a nutshell, plan to use less space. Using less space for offices will hurt the bottom line less if you find yourself with vacant space, and will soften the bite of soaring rental rates in boom times.
A flipped office. The offices and meeting rooms are mostly located against blank walls or in the middle of the space.
High-performance office space, whether that’s done in a moderate way by flipping the offices to the middle of the floor plan and putting workstations on the outside, or in a more radical way with activity-based working, will use at least 10% less space than a traditional offices-on-the-windows, cubicles in the middle.
Let’s break it down. There are 5 big reasons why owners should reconsider how much space they use and why.
Why are high performance office spaces important?
- Minimize your footprint = less money.
The less space you use, the less money you will spend on rent. Simple as that. Using a new office tower in New York as a demonstration model, the same floor plate has been designed based on a traditional perimeter office layout and a more progressive interior office layout. Comparing the two, the traditional office can house 141 staff, while the flipped office can house 153 staff. Assuming the lease rate is $40/sf gross, or $1,204,480, the cost per staff for the traditional office is $8,542. For the flipped office, that same space is less than eight thousand dollars. Over of a year, you’ll spend $99,080 more on a traditional office to house those same 153 people. It adds up.
- Make the space as flexible as possible
Not only are flipped offices more efficient, they are also more flexible. By keeping offices and meeting rooms to the core, you increase the amount of space that can be adapted quickly to meet your needs. Flipped offices are a big step in modernizing your office space. Activity-based offices are even more efficient and will change the way your staff works. You sacrifice dedicated office space for more informal meeting spaces, for phone rooms and places for people to get away to knock out their heads-down work. Flipped offices give you the foundation to make decisions in the future with lower cost.
- Shake it up!
Change is scary. Change is good. Change is all of the above. Taking a step toward change today sets you up for more change in the future. The hardest rock to move is the one you haven’t touched in years. It gets rooted. It gets the idea it can never change. Disruption is the new reality- so don’t be afraid to shake it up.
- Sunny ways. Or the importance of daylight
Flipped offices are sunny offices. And sunny offices are full of happy people. By moving solid walls to the centre of the space, you let daylight get further into the floor. By adding glass to the fronts of meeting rooms and offices, you give everyone a view to the outside. Sunshine is a good thing.
- Who really needs an office?
Corner offices used to mean something. Until office buildings started getting built like Tetris pieces and everyone got one. Your organization may be flat, or hierarchical. It doesn’t really matter. When you look at the work that people do, very little of it is so confidential or high-risk that it needs to be done behind closed doors. Try looking at people’s tasks to determine who needs privacy, it may just be your senior leaders and your HR staff—or no one at all, rather than title.
Pro-tip: any step you take to reduce your space will help your bottom line.
Zombie office space is bad, and not just for your bottom line. It’s a reminder of where things were before. We’ve been working with a group that bought new space because they were bursting at the seams. This is great news. But it has left a bowling alley in the middle of their space and has started to harm the relationships of people on either side of the morass. Filling that space will help to make the new normal. It will knit the team back together.
Are you ready to take the next step? Give us a shout and we can talk about how to keep the zombies out of your space.