Rolling out of bed at 8.50am. Blearily making yourself a coffee and starting work at 9.00am still in your pyjamas! Sounds heavenly doesn’t it? But is the lure of homeworking as productive, convenient and appealing as it seems? Let us answer the question: Do I need office Space?
Whether you’re a freelancer, a work from home employee or a company director, whichever capacity you work in, take a look at some of the reasons why having office space, co-working or virtual, can make a whole lot of sense.
“Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home,” read a memo sent from Yahoo human resources to staff banning them from working from home.
Whilst many of the 4.2 million UK homeworkers (as of the first three months of 2014) might dispute this, the advantages of moving from working at home into an office cannot be ignored.
A state-of-the-art, fully equipped office and your disposal
You might have come accustomed to your cosy and comforting home office but what happens if you experience an IT breakdown, if your Wi-Fi was disconnected for a whole day or if the weather was so hot it became too unbearable to work (unlikely in the UK but not impossible!)?
Our point is, life could be so much easier and your business considerably more ‘secure’ if you moved into a fully-equipped office.
Carrwood Park’s co-working offices, for example, come equipped with extremely fast Wi-Fi, onsite IT support and total temperature control, meaning you would never having to worry about an IT breakdown, temperamental Wi-Fi or a freak British heatwave again!
You can move straight in
Unlike traditional leased offices which require furniture moving in, phone lines and Wi-Fi connected and take time and resources to sort out and be ready to move employees in and start work, with co-working offices you can literally move in and start working immediately.
As we wrote in our blog titled ‘To Lease or not to Lease’, when you lease an office all you typically get is the shell. Even in a home office you have to equip the space with essential furniture, such as a desk, chair and communications. With co-working and serviced offices, all the modern working essentials are already installed and waiting to be used.
Meeting spaces
Hosting a meeting with clients, potential clients, contractors, employers or anyone work-related in your own front room, or worse still a home office stuffed in the corner of your bedroom, won’t convey the most impressive and professional of images.
Many co-working offices have meeting rooms and board rooms available to hire even if you are not a based at that centre. This means remote workers can host meetings and presentations in a professional and well-facilitated space, a luxury that is void from the majority of home offices.
Flexibility
One of the most valued benefits of working from home is the fact it gives workers flexibility. You can work around the school runs, set your own hours and enjoy a more flexible working arrangement compared to a traditional ‘9 to 5’ office job.
The great news is that with co-working and serviced offices you can still enjoy flexibility. They enable you to get out of the house and often lonely homeworking confines and into a vibrant space where you can park yourself next to fellow professional workers and enjoy a flexible working environment.
If you don’t fancy going into the office tomorrow or have a play to attend at your child’s school, you don’t have to – such is the flexibility of co-working and serviced offices.
Move into a serviced office and enjoy a myriad of networking opportunities
Networking is much more than a 21st century working ‘buzzword’. It has become an almost necessity feature of the contemporary business landscape.
Moving out of the doldrums of a home working space and into a pulsating and stylish shared office environment will inevitably put you in contact with individuals that could potentially help your business grow, enabling you to freely enjoy this “indispensable component of modern business growth.”
Relieves relationship tension
Asides the working benefits getting out of the house and into a shared office environment, co-working and shared offices can also help alleviate the strain home working often puts on relationships.
It is not uncommon that when a partner who goes out of the house to work comes home, they want to stay in and relax. By comparison, come teatime, the partner who has been working at home all day wants to go out and feels restless staying in.
Having an office space to go to during the day can relieve such relationship tension.
So what about virtual offices?
Moving from working solely at home to having a virtual office space can be equally as beneficial to workers.
You could literally set up a virtual office tomorrow and, with a professional business address, immediately propel your business and reputation to more professional heights overnight.
With certain virtual office packages you can have a secretary answer the phone for you, meaning you can carry on working without interruptions and never miss a call again – an important business trait that is definitely void of home working environments.
We’re all working under budgets and it could be that many freelancers and work from home professionals feel that forking out money on office space is an avoidable expense.
However, when you weigh up the opportunities, convenience, practicality, professionalism and flexibility co-working, serviced and virtual offices provide, can you really afford not to leave the somewhat limited confines of your home working setup and enter the trendy new world of shared offices?
For top quality, professional, friendly and accessible co-working, serviced and virtual offices on the outskirts of Leeds, get in touch with Carrwood Park.
