The Ideal Office, Your Office Agent

Another great thing about virtual offices is that they abide by the ‘get the best for  less’ motto. This means that if you  ever need a meeting or presentation room, you will have to pay for the service  only when you need to use it. Our team at Your Office Agent are big fans of the virtual Office concept and normally recommend them to all client big and small.

Every month we look for what the office of the future will look like and approach the issue from a state of mind perspective rather than a physical space. What is it that the company is trying to create? what culture is being built around it and does the result change anything? This month we are going to do something that goes against our golden rule of being impartial and we are going to also look into the mirror to see how our company, Your Office Agent along with Satellite telework centers from California, compares to the greats and not so greats of industry, based on our one founding concept of wanting to be part of the Companies Changing Lives movement.

 

The history of Your Office Agent is short and ambitions are high. Our objective was and is to be the global leader in agile workspace strategy.  This means helping companies implement worldwide home and mobile working strategies along with providing a best in class online search platform for low cost virtual, coworking, executive suite, meeting room or managed space solutions. Right at the beginning of our journey, however, we made a promise to ourselves to make a difference while we were building our vision rather than after success had been achieved. We immediately based our marketing plan on doing good for other business people or Paying it forward rather than throwing money into an empty bucket of social media, mass mailings, and online marketing, most of which don’t work too well anyway.

 

We began by creating the, not for profit, business growth network and Companies Changing Lives organization so we could house our community side in a separate place to our agile workspace business. Our first action was to use our property contacts to arrange free networking events for local businesses. The principle of the events were that we all come to network to build meaningful relationships with other businesses in the area and if we did a good job and had a good product then people would trust us. Within a short period of time we had over 1,000 companies registered and 50 to 100 people coming to each event. Every month we came and networked but for a while there was no return. At first some people did not even realize we had another business but then something amazing happened. We thought originally that that client interest in our solutions was the ultimate objective but not only did we get sales but we also got educated about all the other solutions and products that could compliment what we offered. In addition we built up online and offline partnerships and added to our product offering, all by giving. To quantify this our Google rankings dropped by 1 million places and sales for the participating companies from the networking events are over $700,000 in the last year. In addition we know of 8 people who have been hired from these events by other companies and we have found two of our own staff members. The cost of all this was just our time.

 

With the success of the networking groups we decided to add a free business directory and video area to our site and immediately people signed up, getting free access to other businesses and also keeping everyone in touch with us, our webpage and our business. We then added to this a annual charity networking event over a two year period to see if we could pass on the good faith we were building to the greater community. This disappointed us a little as money donations alone are an empty, emotionless vessel which is good for sound bytes but poor on the emotional fulfillment level. Because of this giving journey we connected with some amazing people who make giving their life story. People like Nina Steiner, Barbara Sprenger from satellite, Ted speaker Noam Kostucki and Pay it Forward head honcho Charley Johnson and we all teamed together to take this to another level. Nina has worked tirelessly to make sure that everyone knew about the event, Barbara not only arranged for the entire mall to take part but also opened up her whole office premises for the evening, Noam, Charley and the Pay it Forward foundation gave us wristbands and any other support we need and select areas of the local business community is flooding us with calls to help us.

 

Our result today is 250 people registering for our Pay it Forward event within 5 days of opening it up to the public. The announcement in the next paragraph is for possibly the biggest Pay it Forward party that has ever taken place and one which could not be done without Barabara and her whole Satellite team, who have embraced this as their own mission. Its date of December 11th is between Thanksgiving and Christmas and after an election where the only thing all political parties agreed on was that the only people who could help us were us. It will not cost one dime to put together and every company coming will either gift products, solutions, great advice or empathy to the other companies coming. We have everyone from industry giants Starbucks to the stay at home entrepreneur who is starting out and entry to the event is totally free and not based on wealth, status or looks, its based on the purity of what you want to help your business community with.

 

I just wanted to make sure nobody misses this amazing FREE Christmas Holiday party at the best venue on Main Street, Santa Monica. Its our don’t miss, once a year, Pay It Forward party in Santa Monica in December. Leaving aside just how great a feeling you will have helping other businesses and being helped it will also be an amazing networking event filled with your kind of people (enlightened entrepreneurs). The detail is in the flyer but its all free and its not only an amazing evening with free entry, free food and an beautiful venue but its also Christmas come early with 300 hundred businesses all coming to gift a service or product or just some good advice and to receive the product or service that you need. No catch, No money changes hands, just true collaboration in action. That’s it. Register on the enclosed and get it out to as many people as you can. It will be off the charts.

 

This is the event bright registration. If you are not registered here then you are not registered for the event so REGISTER ASAP for the FREE tickets

 

http://businessgrowthnetwork.eventbrite.com

 

This is the Flyer with the details so you can see just how much fun it will be.

 

http://www.yourofficeagent.com/events/silicon-beach.pdf

 

This is the Facebook page where we will measure the value of the business that will come from this

 

http://www.facebook.com/CompaniesChangingLives

 

 

that’s it. We are sharing this so that others can take inspiration and base their business plans on this way of working, so that companies of all sizes who wish to come to our event can come in the knowledge that none of us are alone unless we want to be and so that you can all look at Part 1 before success and measure this concept in real time. Part 2 will be coming soon.

 

Each week we try to look at trends in the workplace to help our readers understand what the office of the future looks like and each week we surprise ourselves with the cream that rises to the top.  This week is no different and while looking for the human connection to a perfect work environment, we were repeatedly hit with overwhelming evidence showing that the workplace of the future is a very different place to what we have all become used to over the past century.

Our original intent was to look at how the ambitions of us all make much of the changes in the workplace irrelevant because, no matter how good or bad things are, we will be driven to excel by our inner need to overachieve within our environment.  In other words the same leaders would emerge victorious in most environments and the same underachievers would not.  It seemed a simple formula of greed and ego winning out over the wants and desires of the human spirit which would have created a nice contract to all our previous articles about the need for a strong work life balance in organizations.  What we found however surprised even us.

Back in the day the rules of the office were very simple. you start out in a cubicle making coffee for your boss and after a period of being bullied you move on to your own 100 square foot office with no windows but with your name on the door. Over the following 20 years the office became bigger and the views got better until finally in those days before retirement you could finally say that you made it to the coveted corner office on the right side of the corridor and your dinner party invites had been secured for life.  The validity of this courageous journey to the core of the workplace universe had never been questioned before and everyone who looked at your name on that corner office door stared with envy and respect.

In our research we looked through recent recruitment reports and surveys from the Office Team to internal reports from fortune 500 companies and the feedback was startling.  The employees of tomorrow pity our 80 hour week slaving to get to the corner office.  They see our commitment to the success of our company as a sad reflection of how little we have to give at home.  Now it would be nice to pass this off as a few generation X slackers who had never done a days work in their lives but when Office Team did their poll they found 76% of all employees did not want their boss’s job.  when we asked our clients we had a similar percentage.  When we looked at hours worked they don’t work less than any other generation and probably work more, however their focus is on their family as the objective of their work, not their employer.  In addition efficiency ranked as one of the most important requirements they have and flexibility is the number one want and desire.  Not flexibility to relax but flexibility to work in the most efficient environment available to balance the long work hours with the need to be with their family.  So where does this leave us?  Every piece of evidence we have points to the demise of the corner office and to the fact that, unless companies embrace mobile and home working techniques combined with flexi working, they wont keep the great people of today and tomorrow.

As always the Your Office Agent Scorecard is always based on 6 criteria out of a maximum score of 5 points for each criteria:

1. Lease flexibility and space agility – 5 (this way of working is driven by total flexibility)

2. personal employee growth – 4 (teleworking and flexi working can hinder personal learning and growth)

3. Community collaboration – 3 (not a massive surprise although the family are a lot happier)

4. Premises look and feel – 4 (you work wherever feels right)

5. Desire to be here – 5 ( flexibility keeps employees happier longer – fact)

6. Employee work life balance – 5

26 points is a pretty impressive wave goodbye to the ways of the past and an enter here click to the platform of the future. On that note I think I will get back to my family.