1. Hot Desking. This is a great concept and some of the serviced office companies provide it. This can also be beneficial to some of the corporate companies that have staff working on the road and need a desk. The basic concept is that you pay for the time your at the desk. Anyone can use the desk and it has a data connection point, sockets for your laptop and a phone line to plug into and the facility to print documents. The easiest way to explain it is as a “pay as you go desk”.
2. Working from home. More and more companies are allowing their staff to work from home. This reduces the costs of working in offices and allows staff to work from the comfort of their own home. Staff log onto the computer system as they would at the office and would have access to all of the systems remotely. Interestingly enough companies are reporting better performance from staff that work from home against those in the office environment.
3. Reducing carbon footprint. By running virtual offices and having staff working from home you can soon see that not only the reduction of direct costs such as utilities, office lease, cleaning etc but there also the environmental issues such as the reduction of co2 by staff not having to travel to work, less electricity used, less heating etc.
4. Virtualisation. The influence of greater technologies, hi-speed broadband and a recession that keeps people at home has opened new opportunities with companies opting for “pay as you go” micro services such as “virtual assistants”. These are secretaries and P.A.s which offer their services on a per hour basis thus negating the annual cost of having people in an office all of the time and probably under employed.
5. Virtualisation part 2. Again the Internet and hi-speed broadband means that you could reduce costs further by utilising video conferencing for meetings rather than having to get everyone in the same room. You can now get people to simply log on to the conferencing software with their web cam and you have a virtual meeting. Some companies have gone to the extreme with this and use online reality programmes such as 2nd life.
6. Virtualisation Part 3. With a virtual office you can just use it as a mailing address or you can use it in conjunction with a telephone answering service. This is a call centre who represent hundreds of companies but will answer your number as a company representative and put the call through to the right person. This gives the impression to the caller that you have either a professional front desk or a professional switchboard. Again this is better than hiring staff for this task as they would generally be under employed and cost far more than the “Pay as you go” service.
Part two will reveal how you can save even more money and get more from the staff you employ.
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