You're going to need to let your employees work from home
Have you ever stood back looked at your office and thought why does my business have such an expensive venue that your employees must visit each day to work?
Do you have an office just because that's what companies do?
Do you have an office because you don't trust your employees will work at home?
Have you carried out any study to see if your office brings any real value to you, your employees and your business operation?
No? We thought so.
Do you have an office just because that's what companies do?
Since the beginning of time, small businesses have been opening offices, having a dedicated area to work, where teams can collaborate and of course, to impress potential clients. And this made sense, in the past. But, that was before the internet came along, making the ability to work from anywhere a possibility.
While being the owner of the business having a fancy office will, without doubt, keep your ego happy and you have something to show off to your close friends, family and peers - don't forget none of them are going to buy your services.
It may be impressive to potential clients, but people buy from people they like, not what they have. Having a happy, friendly, switched-on staff is far more attractive to new business than having a fancy glass partitioned conference room.
The current pandemic has forced small businesses who previously shunned "working from home" to have to experiment. Many are getting nicely surprised as just how useful working from home is, and how happier and more productive their teams have become. Leading many to consider now the value and office brings to their business.
Now, it is more impressive to a new business lead that you have the technology, to virtually meet them and onboard them without them needed to risk their health visiting your office.
Do you have an office because you don't trust your employees will work at home?
If you don't trust your employees, you have a recruitment problem. Why are you ending up with candidates you don't trust? Why are you then hiring them?
A successful business owner knows the key to success is delegation - if you can't delegate your business cannot scale and will not grow. You should only be hiring staff you know you can delegate responsibility too, who will deliver what you request. Yes, a bad apple may get through, and you should sack them immediately, but if you don't trust your staff, you don't have a business.
If your business had made it through the coronavirus with a team working remotely from home, you have a fantastic team; they carried out their duties, trust won't be an issue anymore, and you now should reward them with the freedom to work from home. Such as BT has done with its 8,500 call centre staff who can continue to work from home or Twitter with its 5,000 employees - significantly more employees than your business has, making it easily doable for you.
Reducing your need for an Office is going to save your business significant cash.
You may have heard of WordPress its a technology that runs the vast majority of websites on the internet. A company called Automattic owns WordPress; the company has 1,170 employees across the globe. Automattic has no offices, it never has, but it has become an incredibly successful business worth about $3b.
Without an office, your business does not have any rent, rates, utilities, connectivity, insurance and other such overheads related to running an office - no matter if you are operating or in lockdown - these still have to be paid.
Without an office, employees must attend your company can hire talent from anywhere in the world because your staff did not need to be physically present to carry out their duties. Having an office holds you back on your search for the best talent, as you can only realistically recruit candidates prepared to travel an hour or less to your location.
Without an office, you also benefit from these cost savings examples:
You no longer need to provide equipment like computers; younger employees generally prefer to be happier using their own devices.
Employees will provide their connectivity through their home broadband and WiFi. We recommend you offer to subsidise these costs, with a small portion of the money you have to save annually from not needing to install and maintain an office internet connection and network.
You no longer need to provide kitchen and nourishment, toilet facilities, say goodbye to the office cleaning and maintenance contractors, health and safety, fire inspections and more costly regulations.
What is your next step?
I recently ran a poll on LinkedIn, and the outcome result identified clearly that employees now want the ability to work from home. It is vital in a post Coronavirus world you give your team the ability to work from home whenever they wish.
You need the right technology to setup easy and secure ways to work from home, Kimbley IT can help you, reserve a video call below and let us have a chat.