How flexible are you? Can you touch your toes without bending your knees? Can you put your legs behind your head? What about touching your nose to your elbow? And, what’s all this stretching got to do with a serviced offices blog anyway?
For serviced offices, flexibility has always been a key selling point. Length of lease, size of office, type of office – all these can be adjusted with minimum fuss and maximum convenience.
In the current financial climate, with many businesses unsure about whether to expand, contract or consolidate, this has become more and more important. A rise in people starting up their own businesses is predicted and many of these, as small or medium start-ups, will require a level of flexibility that only serviced offices can provide.
The change in economic outlook may be fairly recent but the change in working culture is not. We are now used to the idea of switching careers, taking gap years and sabbaticals, returning to study, going part time, or putting off retirement.
The coalition government has recognised this, as a glance at their Programme for Government document shows. It states an intention to ‘maximise flexibility’ for employers and employees. This will be done by ‘providing the competitive environment required for enterprise to thrive’. It has set a deadline of 2015 for the right to flexible working to be introduced to all employees. Currently this only applies to those with children under 17 (18 if the child is disabled) or who are carers.
Today a business needs to be able to adapt to the economic stresses and strains it faces. The ability to downsize in lean times and expand in boom times, all in the same building at minimum cost, is not only seen as sensible for SMEs it’s also often essential to their survival.
Flexible, adaptable, changing – words synonymous with the serviced offices concept.
Disclaimer: Only two of the three activities mentioned in the first paragraph are normally possible for the average human being. This blog accepts no responsibility for damage incurred by readers finding out which ones.
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