4 Tips For Successfully Downsizing Your Office Space

If your company is looking to downsize, you probably have a lot of unanswered questions.

This new ‘work from home’ trend that started during the Coronavirus pandemic doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon.

In fact, there’s a lot of evidence pointing toward the fact that remote work, hybrid workspaces, and other ‘alternative’ types of work situations are going to become more commonplace in the corporate world.

It’s even estimated that, by 2055, 70% of the workforce will work remotely at least 5 days per month.

But how can you make this trend work for your business, instead of getting thrown for a loop by it?

That’s a great question. And as it turns out, one answer might be to downsize your office space, using a prefabricated modular office as your new corporate workspace.

In this post, you’re going to learn not only some of the advantages of downsizing to prefab office units—but you’re also going to learn 4 tips for how to embrace it successfully as a business/organization.

Here’s what you need to know.

Remote Work Is A Growing Trend Among The Modern Workforce

Corporate downsizing has led to more and more ‘work from home’ positions taking the place of traditional ‘office workplace’ positions.

And in a lot of ways, this brings powerful advantages to corporations and business entities.

For example, research has shown that remote workers are 35 to 40 percent more productive than their in-office counterparts.

Downsizing business work positions, and moving those positions to a remote or hybrid workspace model, has also led to a higher retention rate among companies concerned with keeping valuable talent.

In other words, it works well for employees.

But it also saves the company money.

Downsizing Also Reduces Corporate And Carbon Footprints

Corporate downsizing and remote working solutions can also help to reduce the corporate carbon footprint.

Downsizing business buildings and spaces that aren’t necessary cuts down on extra costs, energy consumption, and the overall ‘carbon footprint’ of the business.

This can actually help businesses to grow in ways that probably used to seem almost ‘too outlandish or out-of-the-box’ to be taken seriously before.

There are many strategies for continuing company growth while also incorporating downsizing.

And in this post, you’re going to learn about 4 of the most crucial examples of such strategies, to help your company grow while it’s also reducing its corporate footprint.

Here are the main 4 tips to keep in mind if you want to successfully downsize your office space while growing the company.

4 Tips For Successful Corporate Downsizing

1. Use A Modular Office Booth

If you’re planning on downsizing business costs and incorporating more of a remote environment and remote workforce management, then using a modular office booth can actually be an awesome way to go.

If you’re going to be moving toward managing virtual employees instead of housing your teams at a centralized business location, then you can actually cut out a lot of needless costs by downsizing your building.

For example: Instead of renting out an entire additional building for staff, you can instead choose to downsize to one or two modular office booths, and then have your team work remotely.

You can even use in-plant modular office space and attach it to your warehouse, potentially helping you to downsize an entire office location in one fell swoop.

If you’ve been strategizing about how to downsize your company without actually losing money (or the ability to generate revenue), you’ll likely find that this idea helps to reduce costs and overhead while also increasing productivity and retention rates among your talent.

How To Purchase A Modular Office Booth

Not surprisingly, the market for modular construction is drastically increasing.

You can choose a modular office design that works for you by checking out our modular office booths page.

Getting a quote is easy, and you can even get your prefab office space customized to fit your specific needs and requirements.

Our units can come with air-conditioners and heaters already installed, and they can come equipped with electrical wiring and network capabilities—allowing you to connect them to your IT network.

Plus, you can enjoy the same basic benefits that you’d get in a permanent structure—only at a significantly discounted price.

2. Employ ‘Hot Desking’

‘Hot desking’ is another corporate downsizing tactic that can be used when you’re working on downsizing business costs while still growing the company.

Hot desking can basically be defined as an office seating arrangement in which no employee has an ‘official’ desk. Instead, employees come into work and choose from a selection of ‘open desks’ where they can set up, get their work done, and then leave—leaving the desk open to the next person.

Hot desking helps to minimize the ‘waste’ caused by unused office space.

Here’s the idea behind it.

If you employ 30 workers, but only 20 of them are in your building at any given time, and perhaps 50% of those 20 are constantly away from their desks in meetings anyway—what you basically end up with is a situation where you’re paying for the space for 30 desks, while only 10 of them are seeing consistent use.

You’re also paying for electricity to light these workspaces, for heating/air conditioning to make them comfortable, etc. Even though they’re not getting used.

So instead, you can use hot desking to cut your desk space by enough that you have enough desks open at any given time for whoever happens to be in the building. This creates an almost ‘coffee shop’ type feel, while also saving your company money.

In our example above, this could easily be accomplished by reducing your office space by about 50%. This would, in theory, cut space and utility costs in half while still supplying enough desk space to get everything one.

You could even incorporate the modular office booth into this model to set up a prefab office with open desk space, reserved only for workers who need to come into work for something specific, while the rest of your crew works remotely or from home.

3. Utilize A Hybrid Office Model

Corporate downsizing will sometimes require you to find creative solutions for downsizing business costs.

And one such solution that’s seeing a lot of use among corporations is the hybrid work model.

A hybrid working environment is basically an environment where you create small-sized workspaces to support a remote work framework.

It basically looks like this:

Everyone works remotely. However, to help support your remote workforce, you might set up a few modular offices on your company lot, creating an environment where remote workers can choose to come into work if they need to or want to.

This allows you to keep a hybrid work schedule while still maintaining low corporate overhead.

If you’re looking for a creative solution to the “how to downsize a small business” question, the hybrid model is certainly a model to consider.

4. Reinforce Positive Company Culture Toward Remote Work

And of course, if you’re downsizing business costs while trying not to let corporate downsizing drive down company morale at the same time, it’s always important to have a discussion about company culture as it pertains to remote work.

Company culture can basically be defined as the attitude and behavior the company embraces as it interacts with and leads its employees/teams on a day-to-day basis.

If you’re wondering how to downsize your business without having it negatively affect the morale and performance of your team, taking a positive and proactive approach to remote work can really make a big difference.

Remember, people want to feel significant. They want to feel like they’re contributing to something larger than themselves. Being a part of a great company can bring a lot of meaning to an employee’s life.

But this is only possible if the company culture is on-point.

And if you’re using hybrid workspaces, a remote work model, or even hot desk office spaces to facilitate corporate downsizing, it’s imperative that you focus on developing a company culture that actually contributes to employee satisfaction.

In Conclusion

Downsizing business costs doesn’t have to be rocket science.

If you’re wondering how to downsize a business without actually shrinking your income, you just need to change your outlook on how you work on a day-to-day basis.

A prefabricated modular office booth (or even a portable office trailer) serving as a hot desk or hybrid working space for your team, could prove to be the key to helping your business lower costs while also supporting a thriving remote workforce.

Just remember:

Your employees are the machine that keeps your company working.

Remote work can be an awesome option for reducing costly business overhead. But it’s important that you support your workers when necessary: and a prefabricated office booth can provide you with a creative and awesome way to do that.

Contact us today if you have questions, or would like a quote on how much it would cost to build you a custom prefab modular office today.