When people discuss business scalability, they typically focus on the organization’s capabilities. Are its products and services available to more people over time? Is its more extensive infrastructure and technology stack remaining agile to support its continued evolution in the marketplace?
The part of the conversation they don’t spend enough time thinking about – often until it’s too late – has to do with workspace needs. Simply put, a growing business has growing workspace needs. Because of that, future-proofing your office needs to become a priority, if for no other reason than so you don’t have to continually think about this as you’re faced with other pressing business challenges.
In this context, future-proofing your office means building an environment flexible enough that it can easily adapt to changes in not only the size of your workforce but also the technology they use. It will also need to be able to adjust to the many different work styles on display to support and empower collaboration.
Getting to this stage isn’t tough, but you’ll need to remember a few things along the road. This is true whether you’re talking about an office relocation or building something brand new from the ground up.
1. Incorporate Modular Furniture
When you start thinking about the design of your office, you typically start with the needs of your teams as they exist today. Even something as simple as “Where do people need to sit?” becomes all-encompassing. Teams need to sit together, and those teams need to be positioned close enough that they can work together as required. Once the floor plan is taken care of, a lot of the other design-related choices you’ll be making will be primarily dictated to you.
The issue with this is that growth at this level often requires consistent reconfiguration of the teams themselves. This means that an organizational chart that you’re making design choices around today may literally not exist in six months. Teams may be consolidated. Roles may be re-defined.
All this is to say that incorporating modular furniture is a great way to future-proof your workspace for growth, as by design, these elements can be easily moved around. You don’t have to try to fit your new organizational structure into an old layout – something that will only end up harming productivity and not helping it.
2. Invest in a Scalable Tech Infrastructure
Another one of the biggest ways to future-proof your workspace for growth involves the use of a scalable technology structure. That is to say, invest in solutions from the start that are easy to expand – even if you have no pressing need to do so in the short term.
Case in point: software-as-a-service. Otherwise known as SaaS, for short, software-as-a-service is a type of software distribution model that sees resources allocated on a subscription basis while being delivered on-demand over the Internet.
Think about things in terms of the way you used to have to procure software like a productivity suite. You’d need to pay for a license for each user who needs it. You’d have to install that software on each of their computers physically. Someone would have to update and maintain that software. If more users needed to be added, more licenses needed to be purchased, and the entire process began again.
With SaaS, it’s different. Users can access software from any device with an active Internet connection – even smartphones and tablets. In most situations, you’ll pay for blocks of users – meaning up to a certain limit. If you exceed the limit, you only pay more for additional access.
Now, consider that virtually your entire technology infrastructure is available with this type of flexibility. It’s a great way to free up the valuable time of your in-house IT employees so they can focus on innovating, which is truly where that growth will be driven. This is as opposed to what a lot of IT teams typically spend their time doing – spinning their proverbial wheels and maintaining the status quo.
3. Consider Hybrid Environments
Finally, when future-proofing your workspace for growth, consider layering in elements that support hybrid work from the jump. That’s not to say that you necessarily want to have some of your workforce working remotely in the short term. It just means that you want to leave your options open in the future.
As you grow, your workforce needs will change. You’ll begin looking at a higher tier of candidates. Not all of those candidates can be swayed by salary, and not all of them will want to move for a job. But if your office natively supports hybrid environments, those people can still function largely remotely with the rest of the group that is in the office. You’re simply expanding your access to talent nationally (or even globally), which wouldn’t be possible if you had an office design that still essentially forced everyone to be in the same place at the same time to get essential work done.
Again – it doesn’t matter whether you’re expanding your current space or are considering a future office relocation. These things take time, and the chances are high that by the time you develop a plan and put it into place, the needs of your workspace will change once again.
This constant battle to reconcile “what you need” with “what you have” could not be coming along at a worse time; if yours is an organization in the process of growing, that’s precisely what you need to be focused on. Filling the right positions with the right people. Capitalizing on opportunities instead of being forced to watch them pass you by. You can’t constantly worry about whether your office is configured properly to enable your growth trajectory.
That’s why future-proofing your workspace for growth through best practices like those outlined above is always a good idea. It’s a bit of additional effort on your part, yes – but it’s an effort that will quickly begin to pay for itself. The better positioned your people are to communicate and collaborate with one another, the easier it will be for them to innovate. Innovation is what will continue to enable that growth, which will bring your organization to the people on the largest scale possible.
Also Read: Enhancing SaaS Security: Addressing Unique Challenges in Google Workspace
