Author: aleks

One of the great advantages of serviced offices is the ability to expand as your company grows. But at a time when many more staff than usual will be working from home, serviced offices can also help companies looking to downsize their office space.

In recent weeks we have looked at some of the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, such as the need for increased remote working, more social distancing in the workplace, but also an understandable desire to manage costs at the current time.

Serviced offices can meet all these needs in a variety of different ways, providing you with a workplace of the size you need for the present, but also the opportunity to start expanding again in the coming months as conditions allow for this.

At the same time, you get all the benefits that come with serviced offices at any other time, including reception facilities, kitchen areas (subject to any applicable COVID-secure restrictions) and ergonomic furniture from known and trusted brands.

If you’re looking for premises of the right size to meet your current needs, and you want to be able to start business immediately without needing to refurbish your new workplace, take a look at our serviced offices in London and Manchester.

A little extra room when you need it

In addition to our serviced offices, we also have meeting rooms for hire in London and Manchester at the same premises – so when you need an extra room for client meetings, job interviews or staff training, you don’t have to leave the building.

This gives you the flexibility to hold meetings safely during the coming months, including using a meeting room to provide you with some extra privacy while you speak to a client or candidate by telephone or video conference.

Of course if you need to hold face-to-face meetings, we will do everything we can to make sure our meeting rooms in Manchester and London are thoroughly cleaned and meet all the necessary COVID-secure guidelines that are in place at the time.

We know conditions will continue to change, often very quickly and with little warning, during the months ahead, but this again is all the more reason to take full advantage of the flexibility offered by serviced offices and meeting rooms.

Virtual offices for remote working

Finally, if you have decided to move your business over to 100% remote working or close to it, you might feel that you no longer need physical premises, but still want the positive perception of a trading address in a desirable location.

We provide virtual offices in Manchester and London – again at the same physical address as our serviced offices – which allows you to trade from any location of your choice, using our postal address and other contact details for customers and other third-parties to get in touch.

We can forward mail and redirect phone calls through to you, so you still get the full benefits of our experienced reception staff, even if you never come into the building in person.

If you need to hold a meeting or interview, you have access to our meeting rooms to hire, and as your business grows, we welcome enquiries to move from virtual offices into our serviced office space so you can continue to expand as conditions improve in the coming months.

The UK’s uptake of serviced offices has grown rapidly over the past five years, according to recently published figures, and the use of serviced offices in London is now three times the Europe-wide average.

Writing in Property Journal, Tom Sleigh explains that the UK has unparalleled choice in serviced offices, flexible workspaces and outsourced workplaces – all essentially different names for the same thing.

Across Europe as a whole, serviced offices account for about 2% of all office space. But Mr Sleigh notes that serviced offices in Manchester are double that figure, while serviced offices in London stand at three times as much, roughly 6% of the city’s workspace.

“There has been significant growth over the last five years,” he writes. “The choice of solutions available is unmatched elsewhere in the world.”

Why are there so many serviced offices in the UK?

Ironically, the strong supply and excellent choice of serviced offices in the UK is due in part to the much tighter expectations when leasing office space in the conventional way.

Mr Sleigh points out that UK office leases:

• Last much longer than in Europe
• Collect rents on a quarterly basis
• Have high initial cash deposits (up to 18 months’ rent)
• Are revised upwards on a regular basis
• Date back to medieval times

The UK’s long history has left a legacy of rents, rates and taxes that would once have been collected on quarterly days of religious significance, but now leave tenants sporadically facing very high outgoings.

Serviced offices overcome many of these problems, allowing SMEs in particular to gain access to well-appointed office space without facing punishing upfront and ongoing costs.

At the same time, serviced offices in Manchester and London give occupants a professional and desirable business address to use on letterheads, and access to meeting rooms for hire when a face-to-face meeting needs to take place.

What are the benefits of serviced offices?

Mr Sleigh lists a number of advantages of serviced offices over conventional leasehold space, including:

• Better working environments
• Ease of consumption
• Easier entry and exit
• Improved cost certainty
• Lower balance sheet liability
• Lower capital expense
• Lower operational risk

These are all in addition to the flexibility of how long a tenant occupies the space for – and can often be even more important to the decision-making process.

How long do tenants stay in serviced offices?

According to the article, the average tenancy in serviced offices is 35 months, even though the typical minimum occupancy period is 12 months, which shows that many tenants choose to extend their lease and continue to benefit from their use of the space.

There is generally no reason why you must move out unless you choose to, and this gives occupants a good amount of control compared with conventional commercial lease renewals.

All of this adds up to high levels of confidence and cost control for SMEs, with rents posing less of a cash flow risk – advantages UK companies in particular have been quick to grasp hold of as the country’s uptake of serviced offices in London and Manchester has boomed.

We all know lighting is an important element in serviced offices, but how do the different kinds of lighting combine to influence employee satisfaction in modern shared offices?

A recent study in Frontiers in Built Environment looked at satisfaction levels among employees in a newly retrofitted Seattle office block.

Workers in the refurbished offices were asked to rate their workplace in terms of how satisfied they were with it, both before and after the redecoration was carried out.

Lighting was one element of the survey, along with other environmental qualities like air quality, acoustics, workplace layout and size.

In particular, the researchers found that employees were generally happy with light levels, even when the overhead illumination was less bright than is usually recommended.

Putting employees in control of lighting

Part of the retrofit process involved giving employees more control over their lighting. Overhead lighting was replaced with remote control LED fixtures with adjustable colour and temperature capabilities.

Each employee also had task lighting so they could illuminate their own area without affecting their colleagues, and access to natural light where windows were not blocked by neighbouring buildings.

Interestingly, the study found four statistically significant improvements in satisfaction after the retrofit:

• Aesthetics of work area
• Amount of desktop lighting
• Amount of light for computer work
• Access to an outside view

This serves to underline how the visual appearance – including lighting and aesthetics – of a shared workplace can have a big impact on employee satisfaction.

Saving energy on office lighting

The study revealed results with useful implications for saving energy on office lighting. In particular, employees working with backlit computer displays did not need bright ambient lighting.

In fact, the workers in one of the offices surveyed specifically requested lower lighting levels from overhead.

At the same time, the researchers found the office managers used relatively dim overhead lighting – below the normal recommended light intensity – as part of efforts to save energy consumption.

Natural light is of course one way to illuminate shared and serviced offices without running up an electricity bill.

Individual task lighting, especially using energy-efficient LED bulbs, ensures employees can brighten their own work area when necessary, such as for paper work instead of screen time, again without unnecessary energy expenditure.

Light and bright serviced offices

Our own serviced offices in London and Manchester make good use of natural daylight whenever possible, with waterside locations and large windows for unobstructed views of the outside world.

At times artificial lighting is essential, especially in winter, so we take advantage of light, bright colour schemes that are easy to light from overhead or with task lighting.

And when your employees need to take a break from the office – for example, to look at something other than a backlit computer screen – we provide comfortable breakout rooms and easy access to outside spaces for a refreshing walk.

Finally, we allow our tenants to add their own branding and colour schemes to the serviced office space they occupy – so if you want to put your own stamp on your space, just let us know.

As more businesses start to get employees back to work, the term ‘COVID-secure workplace’ is the latest new addition to the UK’s Coronavirus vocabulary, and serviced offices can help you to open back up in a number of important ways.

For companies that already make use of our serviced offices, there are several things you can do to help ensure your workforce complies with social distancing in the office:

• Space out workstations as much as possible
• Avoid employees facing each other across a desk
• Erect physical barriers wherever 2m separation is impossible

Imagine the layout of a traditional schoolroom, with individual desks all facing front – this spaces people apart and makes the best use of the room available by positioning workstations in a kind of grid layout.

We are happy to accommodate social distancing measures as much as possible in our serviced offices in Manchester and London, and as always the large windows let in plenty of natural light to help your employees feel comfortable in their new location.

If you need more space

In some cases, you might simply have too many employees to allow for adequate spacing between their seating positions.

Subject to availability in our serviced offices in Manchester and London, we can often provide additional room on-site, allowing you to spread out into an extra office on the same floor or elsewhere in the building.

This is especially useful if you are unable to allow your employees to work from home, so if you are interested in renting some extra space, please check with us as soon as possible so we can help you get your new rooms ready before staff return from furlough.

Our premises are located close to important business districts like Manchester city centre, MediaCityUK and Salford Quays, as well as the Isle of Dogs and nearby Canary Wharf.

But we have always avoided the most crowded areas, preferring to give our clients some open space and, where possible, views across open water – all of which is particularly important for the foreseeable future.

How virtual offices can help

If you are able to allow employees to work from home, or if you’d prefer to work from home yourself during this time, we can provide seamless virtual office services in Manchester and London.

Essentially this means that although you don’t come into the office in person, you can still be contacted at your usual physical business address.

This is a service we provide anyway, and it’s great for start-up businesses that don’t need physical premises or for sole traders who can easily work from a home office or spare room.

But for obvious reasons it’s taken on new meaning in 2020, following a huge uptick in people working from home almost overnight.

Let us know if you need to know more about our virtual offices in Manchester and London, which can give you the professional appearance of a physical presence in key urban centres, without having to travel on crowded public transport or have all of your staff based in the office in person.