Office rent is always one of the biggest running monthly cost for every business. Therefore no effort must be spared to ensure that businesses spend within their budget , ideally optimising all resources.
There are a number of ways in which you can pull down your expenditure and run your office at minimal costs.
A right-sized office
Get an office space that has sufficient space to accommodate all your office staff and activities, but not too large that some portion of it remains under utilised. Remember that your rent increase with the floor area, so it’s better to have a good idea of how much space you would be requiring beforehand. One common mistake was to lease a conventional office with your own conference or meeting room when it was hardly used. Given in the same scenario, it would be a better idea to lease a serviced office or executive suite with meeting rooms on a ad hoc hire.
Lease a fitted office
One of the biggest cost of leasing a new office will be the office outfitting. It can cost anything from $50 per square foot to $250 per square foot , depending on the level and type of fit out.
For a typical size of 1000 sft office, it can cost you up to $250,000 ! And that represent a huge sum of money.
However it remains a big challenge , to lease a office with that right type of ideal fit out for your team. As every company as their own designated requirements and layout. Therefore tenants are highly encouraged to adjust their expectations, when it comes to office fit out. Some minor adjustments can be incorporated in fit in the new team which is much preferred than out fitting the entire place.
Used furniture
You don’t necessarily have to buy brand new office furniture, at least not all of it. Second hand furniture can work just as fine and they come at a lesser price. For example, you can buy off furniture from the previous occupants of your office space, or you can buy used furniture online, especially either from Taobao or Carousell. Just make sure that you are buying quality furniture that’s worth the money.
Use alternative sources of energy to reduce electricity bills.
Consider getting an office that has large windows and receives a good amount of sunlight during the day. Such offices offer many advantages. First of all it will reduce your power bills since lesser number of lights will be required. Second, it will give a fresher and brighter look to your office. Third, it will help you contribute towards saving precious energy.
If your office is in Singapore, you can try switching your electricity supplier. By doing so , you can reduce your electricity bill by 30-40%.
Use Less Paper
You can reduce the usage of paper in your office and save on supply expenditure. One way to do this is by making employees more aware about paper wastage. Another way is by shifting work to digital platforms through a cloud service or an office server. As such less space is required to store these documents, therefore you are able to reap huge savings from renting lesser space that you actually needed.
Workforce allocation
Take a closer look at your workforce, including their tasks, duties and timelines as in what kind of jobs and deadlines they are assigned. Do they really require a permanent seat in your office ? Do they come in everyday ? Or perhaps they can work off site or at home ? In order to reduce staff costs, it’s also very common nowadays many companies employ staff that are working remotely , often in a different city. Conduct a workforce re-allocation exercise and uncover ways you can place lesser work stations in your office space for essential staff, or core appointment holders. As a result you will lease a smaller space than what was initially required.
Adopt different Workspace Strategies
It’s important to try out alternative workspace strategies. In today’s era of changing technology and tempo, it no longer makes sense to stick to same old traditional way of working. Relating to the previous point of workforce allocation, it’s imperative to look at what kind of strategies that may work better for your organisation , whether its a start-up or fast growing enterprise. One of the often used strategies will be the Core & Flex model that many fast growing startups and even MNCs actually deployed. You will need to determine the core team of your workforce, such as essential staff that need to be placed together everyday and staff that are often outside meeting clients or vendors or staff that are working remotely. You may able able to place such staff on a site that provides flexible workspace arrangement, i.e co-working , serviced offices , either on a short term or month to month basis. Such arrangement allows you enough flexibility to reduce or even increase staff that you can take on , should there be a need.
By maximising all available resources, reducing wastage will enable great savings in running an office and this will add up to your profit kitty at the end of every year. Some of these can be given to employees for contributing in building a lean and effective workspace for everyone in the organisation.
Not sure on details of the above and how to execute them, contact us today , and we will be able to offer you a free non-obligatory consultation.
