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How To Maximize Your Office Space Lease

Written by Posted On Monday, 11 February 2019 16:14

For business owners and companies, the lease on office space can be a burden in their expenses especially if the location is in cities or areas with a high standard of living. With a limited floor space and a growing number of employees, it is complicated to squeeze in more people, and there will be more entropy in the area. This can affect employee performance and can hinder the productivity of your people. So it is imperative to establish a good working environment for your staff.

Here are some ideas on how you can maximize your office space lease:

1. Schedule working hours

Although this might apply to everyone, a good idea is to create different working schedules among your employees. Some would go to the office in the day, and some would work on the night. If you are into consumer relations and some of your clients are overseas, this type of strategy might work for you.

You can adapt a shifting schedule similar to what factories implement so that their production runs continuously. Since you cannot accommodate a hundred staff in a limited office space, you might want to split up half of your personnel to work from 4 am to 1 pm, and the rest to report for work starting from 4 pm to 1 am. Allocate a few hours in between so that maintenance services will not interfere during working hours.

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2. A good lighting and shades

A good trick on making a small office space bigger is through lighting. Good lighting will illuminate the entire area and creates a good vibe for working. It also increases your employee’s productivity. Skip the heavy lamps and switch to LED lights. They provide better lighting and can reduce your electricity cost in your office lease.

Most office spaces have huge windows and it is not always a good idea to keep it clear especially during warm and sunny days. Choose curtain that are not bulky, or have roman shades installed in your office space. It is neat-looking and does not take too much space.

3. Allow office sharing

If you are a small business owner or just a startup company, you can also share your office space with other small sized companies. It is another great way of maximizing office space lease, but more importantly you are reducing the cost of the lease since you can’t still fill up the entire area if you are just starting.

4. Switch to common spaces

Installment of rooms and cubicles in a floor space prevents maximization of space since dividers take up space as well. For a long time, most offices provide rooms and cubicles to each of its employees. This is initially advantageous since they allow their employees to have a sense of privacy. But as the management adds more people through time, the employees are forced to share their rooms with other co-workers.

The trend nowadays is to build common areas like the long tables you see in a library that can accommodate more people. It is advantageous since almost everybody is switching to laptops instead of desktops in the office setting. It can also encourage to build stronger relationships and professional social skills among colleagues.

5. Ditch conference rooms

Another space consuming area in an office is conference rooms. The use of it is not maximized at all since not every hour meetings are being held in the place. Skipping the conference room is a great idea, instead, do stand up meetings like in a cocktail party setting. A group of consultants reported that this type of meeting increases the creativity of attendees thus increasing the chance of discovering innovations in the company. Meeting agendas should be straight to the point and short. You can also set outside the office meetings like in a coffee shop.

6. Go paperless

Minimizing the paperwork and going paperless is another possibility to maximize your office space, but it doesn’t really do much in terms of your lease. Technology now allows sharing of documents online and collaborative setup where everyone who has access in a document can work on it all at the same time.

Instead of buying large steel cabinet for record keeping, invest in cloud storages and external hard drives. Since the latter are small items, it will not take too much space, and you can even put it in a big drawer.

Final thoughts:

Since office space is always associated with a minimal area, you should implement ways on how to maximize every space. You can either work on maximizing the use of each floor area by switching to common spaces, going paperless and removing conference rooms that is not being used all the time. Moreover, you can also implement shifting working hours to accommodate a large number of staff in a limited space without overcrowding the entire space.

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Elena Tahora

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