Closing your Office and Working from Home: Everything you Should Know

By Editor1SYS | June 20, 2022 0 Comments

The pandemic has made us all open our eyes a little bit to our working practices, and people are starting to rethink how they did things before and whether or not that’s right for their work-life balance.  We are seeing an increasing number of businesses choosing to either downscale their office space to allow flexible working – or else move to a complete working from home model.  If you are considering closing your office, here is a list of things that you should know!

Think about the Logistics

It’s likely that you will have accumulated an office full of furniture, and fixtures and fittings.  You need to decide how you are going to reallocate that, or if in fact you are going to.  It could be that you sell some of these assets on – or that you move them over to your home working environment.  The working from home model, may just be an experiment for some to see how it works in a post-COVID world, and as such it could be that you rent a storage lock up as a safety net, or as an interim solution until you have your new setup in place.  Or you could rent the space until you have a complete plan of action as to what you are going to do with it. 

There Needs to be Regular Touchpoints with your Team

Although you may have had to adapt to working from home for a while during COVID – if you are planning on making it a more permanent solution – you need to make sure that you have really thought about having regular touchpoints for your team so they are engaged and don’t feel isolated.  It could be that you have morning Zoom meetings and have weekly meets at a regular location so there is that human contact, but its critical that they feel connected to you and the business. 

You Need to Have the Right Equipment

It could be that someone’s work from home set up is quite different – and it could be that as an employer you need to make allowances for that.  For example, it could be that the desk that someone is using doesn’t quite fit in their home space, or a desktop computer would no longer work and a laptop is more suitable particularly if they will be working from different places.  Make sure you take all of this into account when finalising your working model as it could be budget that you hadn’t allocated for.  

There Needs to be the Right Project Management Tech in Place

Project managing people remotely can be a different kettle of fish than if everyone is in the same place.  as such, you should ensure you have invested in the right software for this.  A great example of this could be Trello.  Here you can create different project teams and add them to boards.  You can create checklists, assign them to specific team members and also add due dates if need be.  It can also be a great external tool too as you can add in clients, or potentially any supplier you outsource to.  It gives everyone real-time visibility as to what’s going on so you can ensure everything is going to plan. 

If you are contemplating closing your office and instead moving to a working from home model – make sure you take all of these things into consideration first.  Poor preparation can end up costing you money, and create issues within the operations of your business.