We see it on our local news. Whether you're in San Francisco, London, or Hong Kong, there has unsurprisingly been an increase in the number of dormant office buildings, shops, and restaurants in every business district.
At the end of the day, vacant space is nothing but a waste of money. Which is bad for commercial real estate, where the purpose of the space is to generate returns per square foot.
But before you start trying to turn any unused real estate into your traditional office space filled with desks and chairs, why not consider some other options to repurpose the space and turn it into a useful area conducive to productivity and employee satisfaction? You might even be able to gain a new revenue stream!
If your lease allows subleasing, renting your office space out to other businesses is a great way to use up any extra office space, foster a dynamic, collaborative working culture and make some extra money at the same time! If you’re not sure how to reach such businesses, operators like BOOQED connect interested parties with companies offering workspaces so you can easily list any available spaces for others searching for a place to work. It’s a win-win!
As a follow-up to creating a coworking space, you can also offer any unutilized spaces for private events! With a few simple steps, you can easily convert any empty rooms into a multipurpose venue for book clubs, roundtable discussions, private parties, small art galleries and everything in between!
The best part about an empty space is the unlimited potential it has! Without the stationary set up of heavy-duty filing cabinets or desks in place, your empty office space can become a versatile, multipurpose area for all of your workplace needs – it can be available to employees to be transformed for any occasion on-demand, or with the addition of a few makeshift tables, chairs and a whiteboard, be used as an impromptu conference or meeting room.
If you want to go one step further, space operators around the world are now adding standalone office pods furnished as a workspace or meeting room as an effective way to create a private multi-functional space in offices, building lobbies, malls, train stations and more. People can have a soundproof booth to jump into whenever they need to take a call, get some work done, or simply get a quiet rest space. If you’re interested to find out more, check out our QUBIC work pod!
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past decade, you’ll have heard everyone talking about how a distributed workforce model is ‘the new normal’. Gone is the traditional office where you have a head office and cubicles dividing each department and in comes remote workers and flexible schedules as part of a new leaner workplace organization. And with that, the rocketing popularity of hot-desking aka an office set-up with no permanent, assigned seats.
So, if your office comprises of remote teams, rather than have everyone sit at their own seats that remain empty half the time, have teams utilize hot desks as and when they come into the office.
Of course, an empty office space doesn’t have to just be used for work purposes only.
Your employees need some downtime every now and again, and if you’ve got an entire empty room that’s going unused for months on end, you can create a space that lets them take a break without disrupt the rest of the office.
While it sounds like a big commitment, it’s fairly inexpensive to invest in a few beanbags and a foosball table to create an employee break room. You might even find that it helps to decrease stress in the office, boost employee morale while emphasizing a good work-life balance!
Now, before you rush into a decision on how to reuse your empty office spaces, it’s a good idea to first evaluate your workplace and find out the reason for why you have any vacant spaces. A few questions you can ask yourself include:
Simply by looking around your office layout, you might find ways to efficiently utilize any empty areas even if it’s by spreading out across your current floor plan.
It's important to ensure you're effectively converting unused space at your office building into something that generates positive returns. And it doesn't have to be all about revenue either. You can have good returns in employee and guest satisfaction, brand recognition, and workplace productivity.
With solutions like QUBIC, you can create multi-functional spaces without new construction. You can make it bookable and monetize the space, and get a better understanding of your existing space through analytics software. You might see that there are plenty of opportunities to reduce overhead costs and make the workplace experience better!
For more information about QUBIC, please visit our website or reach out to our team at sales@booqed.com.
