by PJExpat
My company is based out of a city in America (I’m being vague on purpose) we support operations all across the world. Our central office has about 150~ employees who work out of a building in a very big, very expensive city and we pay around $115k a month for our office. It comes out to 1.38 million a year plus other costs (power/heat/etc/janitorial service) in all I believe we spend close to 1.8-1.9 million a year on this office space
No customers actually visit the office, and we very rarely even meet vendors there.
I’m on the field side of operations we operate outside of an office environment all the time and for years I along with quite a few folks on the field side have been questioning why are we spending so much money on a physical location when it provides no real value?
The answer was always “We need a place for our support staff to work out of”
However due to COVID19 our head office was required to shut down, however our worldwide operations are still going on and they need the head office to function so we moved to a 100% work from home, we literally just told our support staff to pack up their computers and go home.
For the first week or so we had some growing pain issues, but ever since then, everything has been fine. We got an email from our CEO saying that effective immediately our head office will be permanently closed. Instead all employees will be provided with a monthly allowance for office supplies, new hires will be provided with a one-time office setup bonus and all our support staff will now work remotely from home. For company functions, we’ll rent out space as required on a day to day basis.
I can see a lot of companies taking this approach, I could see a lot of big corporations going “You know what? We operated just fine working form home why do I need to spend millions for a place for our employees to work out of?”
Funny enough the last company I worked for back in 2016 I was the last employee to work in an office for them. I was hired, I came to work and my manager said “I know this place looks empty, you are actually going be the last new hire to ever step foot in here” he later said company wide the company was spending something like $75 million a year on office space and it figured it could save shit tons of money by having everyone work from home.