Before COVID-19, perhaps you had 100+/- employees working on the two floors you occupy in that new downtown office building. Not only is the monthly lease expense high but you also have the utilities, the exquisite coffee machines, and the doodads that everyone asked for in the kitchen. It is a challenge for your facilities manager to maintain as well as your finance director who is trying to pay the invoices.
Bang, then COVID hit and for the last year and a half, you have had a skeleton staff on your two floors. Then you had to plan for the return to on-site work, installing plexiglass shields, directional floor markers, and hand sanitizer machines, hoping the day would come when most of your employees would be back in their workspaces and offices.
Maybe Labor Day was chosen as a good time to ease the employees back into the office. You informed everyone, and they were getting ready to come back in. You notified staff of your vaccination policy and its exceptions. All was going according to plan until something called the Delta variant raised its head.
Now you are rethinking your decisions. Do you require all to be vaccinated? Do you make masks mandatory in your office spaces? Do you continue to allow employees to work from home until the winds shift? Or do you think about reducing your office space and embracing remote work?
With most folks becoming accustomed to working from home, reducing your office space can be a smart decision. However, there are a lot of variables to consider when doing so.
- What does your lease say? Can you reduce with no penalties? Can you sub-let the space? Kind of tough as there is an abundance of office space in many markets. Do you bite this costly bullet?
- What about your office furniture? Costly when you bought it and moved it in. As with office space, there is a glut of office furniture on the market. If you give it away, there is usually a cost to dismantle and remove it.
- What about your file room and cabinets? Remember that decision years ago when you had the opportunity to go paperless and you hesitated? Catching up with now as you may be paper heavy. Do you shred? Do you give it to that outrageously priced off-site storage vendor? Or now, do you digitize everything?
- What is your office space reduction return on investment (ROI)? Reducing will be costly upfront but how long will it take you to recoup those monies? Must have a plan in place.
Start thinking about these issues now, as it appears we will have a new COVID variant called Lambda soon which may force your hand.