Overcoming The Challenge Of The Need For Physical Office Space

The demand for Virtual Office space continues to gain momentum. The ‘must have a physical office’ paradigm is losing oomph. Truth be told, the traditional 9-to-5, full-time, presenteeism work model started losing its must-ness grip just as home-based and portable, electronic gadgetry and computers, along with more-affordable broadband availability, blasted off in popularity during the 90s.

People no longer needed to be tethered to their desks full-time (sometimes a status-rewarded office), and when they were able to be comparably productive remote-working, their office desk-time needs shrunk, to the point where some workspaces were not utilized 50% or more of the time. Enter the Virtual Office, Telecommuting, Home-working and Touchdown Space revolution.

The thinking, especially among the more recent work tribes, was: “Why routinely trudge to work and lose time and fare/toll money commuting, or poison the atmosphere with carbon emissions, when neither might be necessary if people can achieve the required work results, doing so part-time or full-time from home, or from a convenient, closer-to-home Touchdown Space? Good question!

The simple answer is – many don’t need to have a full-time office these days, and it makes little sense to have one if it’s preferable, convenient, economically more attractive, and equally (or sometimes more) productive to work out in the field, or from home. But if you grew-up working 9-to-5 in an office, the transition to home-working is not the ‘snap’ that all might presume. Most people still need to meet others, and a meeting at a home-office is not optimal or appropriate.

Besides that, people are social creatures that need to get out and about, and at least occasionally mix it up in a business and office community. Some home-workers find it hard to pull away from the ease of watching the latest episode of ‘One Life To Live’ or ‘The Price Is Right’ – and they need the triggering mechanism to get them up and out of the house to work, at least from time-to-time (and in some instances, it’s the spouse or partner that appreciates the ‘break’ of a home-worker plying their trade elsewhere for the day).

Add to that the fact that, while most interpersonal meeting features can be replicated through phone and conference calls, Face-time, Skype or other telecommuting applications – even the most advanced video-conferencing capabilities don’t capture the whole ball of wax that goes into true, total, interpersonal communications. Some claim that quality communicating is upwards of 50% physical – not just verbal.

The bottom line is that people emote, respond, and send valuable and sometimes critical messages in mysterious, subliminal ways – ways that can’t always be duplicated by phone or video feeds. People value from interfacing with each other in-person … which is where Virtual Officing shines as the cost-effective, flexible solution in today’s workspace and work-way scene.

Virtual Officing allows you the best of both worlds: to be able to work lean and thrifty from home … yet provides you an hourly or daily home-away-from-home based office option when face-to-face meeting, or a break to sharpen that office-persona edge is optimal.

The secret to ‘overcoming the challenge of the need for physical office space’ is to never give up entirely on the ability to work at an office when needed. The answer to that challenge is to have a professional, reliable Virtual Office as a base where meetings, and face-to-face, human, business dealings can be provided on-demand and at a fraction of the cost of a little-used, traditional office.

About Ray Lindenberg

Ray Lindenberg is President of WANY - The Workspace Association of New York, and IN-Cert - The International Cooperative of A+ Certified Workspaces; and is the Chief Consultant & Innovation Officer at the Winning Workspaces Hospitality Group.