You’ve got a building which requires roughly 10,000 square feet for proper operations. In that building are roughly 200 employees from day to day. Each employee gets a computer, a keyboard, a mouse, a headset, a chair, a desk, and partitions for a cubicle. That’s $1,000 per employee, at minimum. Rent on the facility is $3,000 a month, for this scenario. So establishment of the facility costs you $210,000, roughly, before operations begin. (Included is the first month’s rent plus deposit and an additional $4,000 for service fees or other unpredictable exigencies.) From that point, monthly operations of that facility–excluding employee pay–are going to be anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 a month–you’ll have maintenance, electricity, plumbing, heating, security, etc. So you’re spending $60-120,000 a year, plus $210,000 establishing cost.
But say instead of renting a building, you just kept the required personnel managers in their own office downtown, which only costs $1500 per manager per equipment, plus $1500 a month in rent–total (including utilities). There are only ten managers who can’t do their job from a remote location, and require benefits. That’s $33,000 in a year, as opposed to $270,000 – $310,000 in a year for the same output. And those figures do not even take into account employee salaries.
In modern tech news, technological innovations like mobile office structuring are big; and it’s easy to see why: they’re saving big businesses billions across the world.
Why Offices Are Going Mobile
If you’ve got a mobile phone or a tablet, you’ve basically got an office in your pocket. So many functions are being automated and digitized over the web today that “Smart” everything is at our doorsteps. From “smart” homes that can be controlled via “smart” phone, to “smart” cities that feature bicycles and cars for public use. A regular tech news item concerns how the modern office is getting a lot “smarter” too; with things like cloud computing technology and digital timesheet services allowing businesses to have a constant finger on the pulse of operations. A salesman need not restrict himself to the office. At worst he needs his cellular phone and a laptop. He can clock-in via smartphone in the morning, proceeding directly to that client with whom a merger is being negotiated.
Remote Workers
Consider the advantage of employees remotely working. You can outsource jobs via the internet–at least the ones that don’t require specific affiliation. Consider individuals who answer phones for customer service. What if, instead of having 180 employees in cubicles in an office that you have to rent, stocked with emergency doors, safety supplies, break rooms, restrooms, lockers, and all the politics which accompany those things–as well as their infrastructural accoutrements, like janitors and repairmen; not to mention IT people and security–instead of all that, you could put a posting on a website for at-discretion work via solid internet connection. Employees can be run through a quick training course, including an equipment verification, and then they can be let loose on customers needing customer support. If they do well, you keep them. If not, you’ve got an infinite pool to draw from.
Increased Draw
You can increase hourly wage for remote employees, because you don’t have to guarantee benefits, and the likelihood is those who work such positions have several “irons in the fire”, as it were. The appeal of remotely working, and the ubiquity of services remote workers can provide, is making the mobile office a stable of modernity. As automated internet timesheet collection developments become feasible, you’re more likely to see businesses adopting this new model of operations.
