Since the advent of the Internet, there has been a rapid movement toward work at home job situations. Just drop in an Internet connection and a VoIP telephone line, and you have your own office - no commute, while your employer saves the cost of the office space. But not everybody wants to work from home.
Executive Suites – Office Environment Without the Hassles & Costs
It’s just as easy, and almost as inexpensive to set up an office for one or many in an executive suite. These are personal offices, often in Class A buildings, that provide a great place for you to work, either full time or occasionally, without a lot of the usual overhead of a big office. While they offer amenities that suit today’s work styles, they are based on concepts from 20 years ago, where remote workers would share suites and utilities and have somebody to answer the phones and put together PowerPoint presentations for them. Although you can now easily put together your own presentations on your own tablet, the idea of shared space is still the same.
Today’s executive suites can be found throughout the world, occupied by solo entrepreneurs, small companies, or offshoot offices of larger companies. They include a desk, telephone and broadband Internet access; are typically comfortable if not luxurious. Some include kitchens; and most give you access to somebody who can answer the telephone - much nicer than reaching an auto-attendant - or greet visitors for you. According Mr. Jeff Reinstein of Premier Business Centers, a lot of the growth in executive suites is due to higher usage of larger companies. Not only are they using them in cities remote from their headquarters; theyâre also expanding the number of people that they are housing in each executive suite. The larger companies see it as a way to get flexibility for growth without all the hassles of long term lease negotiation, buying and accounting for furniture, and moving whenever they need more space.
Technology Increases Flexibility
The spectrum of office options has become quite wide, according to Mr. Reinstein, whose company operates executive suites in 70 locations in California, Texas and elsewhere. If you need a full time office away from company headquarters or as a standalone entrepreneur, you can get it fully equipped with entry points at less than $200 monthly. But if you don’t need it full time, you can opt for a plan that provides a conference room and an office with desk for a few hours a month - maybe even with the ability to use several executives suites in different cities because you travel. Some executive suites even provide services that are highly skewed toward the technology only – Internet, phone and a first class address to which you can have mail delivered. They’re all popular.
A New Personnel Benefit
So if you’re a growing company that wants flexibility, short commitments, good value and lower administrative costs, you might want to consider executive suites as an option for growth. With good engineers, sales talent and other workers spread throughout the globe, this could help you get the best people because you can provide them with an office environment no matter where they live. Not everybody likes to work at home; and you don’t have to make them.
And if you’re an engineer, sales person, executive or simply a talented business person, this gives you another negotiating point to get that company to hire you without making you move to corporate HQ.
Who knows; you might end up negotiating toward the same objective.
I am a Senior at the University of Texas majoring in Consulting & Change Management.
