Where you locate matters tremendously to your startup’s future, in my book, Startup Cities, I found that each city has a different attitude towards startups. Those cultural differences between regions can greatly affect whether your startup can raise capital and hire the talent you need to turn your idea into a fast-growing public company.
Consider the case of the file storage service Dropbox. Its CEO, Drew Houston, is a Massachusetts native who graduated from MIT and first pitched his idea — a service that would let people store spreadsheets, photos, and other files on their desktop and the cloud — to Boston-area investors, according to the Boston Globe.
The local investors thought it was a nice idea that Microsoft or Google could easily copy — so they passed on it. When Houston gave a demo in Silicon Valley, an angel investor chatted with his cofounder after their pitch and introduced them to Sequoia Capital — a leading venture capital firm — that invested within days.
Boston investors must be kicking themselves now. Dropbox went public and now has a stock market capitalization of $11 billion, while Houston — who recently gave MIT $10 million to endow a professorship to MIT — has a net worth of $2.2 billion, noted the Globe.
Surely it mattered for Dropbox before the pandemic — but now that so many people are working from home and millions are quitting their jobs — does location still matter? And when people can theoretically work from anywhere, why should a company                spend money on office space in a specific location?
Here are four takeaways for business leaders that I glean from Houston’s decision to reduce Dropbox’s office space by 80 percent.
1. Figure out what work can continue to be done remotely:—
The pandemic sent many workers home. If their work was doable through a combination of typing into a laptop and participating in videoconferencing, there may be little reason to change that approach.
However, you should analyze objectively how well that work has been getting done. Are your people producing high quality work and meeting deadlines? More generally, are your productivity, customer retention, customer satisfaction, and market share rising?
If so, you should keep that work remote. You should also explore whether there are other kinds of work that have been done in the office that could be shifted to remote work while improving performance.
If your company’s productivity and market share trends are deteriorating, you should find out why. This investigation should help you                     determine whether you should move some of your work back to in-person or take other actions to solve the problem.
2. Know the purpose of your in-person interactions:—
Houston saw the pandemic as a 100-year-flood-like event that forced him to rethink how people work. While he was happy that people can work from home — and realizes that it saves them commuting time, he also concluded that in-person interactions have an enduring purpose: to build relationships with coworkers, the Globe reported.
The most significant takeaway for business leaders is to rethink whether office space is something your company still needs and if so, what the purpose of the space should be.
3. Choose office space to suit that purpose:—Â
In a world converted through Covid-19, distinct kinds of corporations have different area requirements. It’s likely that manufacturing corporations will still want factories and warehouses and store-based outlets will still need shops so customers can see and touch their merchandise before buying.
Companies that offer a service more suitable through computer systems need far less office area than they did before. For Dropbox, the solution was to put off man or woman desks and turn the workplace into a “convening, collaborative area,” Houston said. Dropbox has carried out this motive while removing fees through lowering its actual property footprint through 80 percent.
Business leaders won’t be capable of lessen their workplace area as plenty as Dropbox has — however they ought to ensure to healthy their area necessities to a clean motive in a international wherein plenty workplace paintings may be accomplished at domestic.
4. Let your people choose when to come to the office:—
Finally, I believe Dropbox’s coverage that man or woman paintings ought to be accomplished at domestic and those ought to now no longer be required to return back into the workplace a selected wide variety of days every week. The cause is that each one the crew individuals operating on a venture won’t be withinside the workplace at the identical day.
I could allow crew individuals agree on an afternoon whilst they’ll all meet collectively withinside the workplace to bolster their relationships.
Despite the modifications wrought through the pandemic, wherein you find your startup nevertheless matters. Follow those 4 steps and you may make the nice use of the workplace area you pick out to retain.
Courtesy:— Inc.