Survival Tips
With 2012 finally here both the new business year and how it will pan out are hot topics. Whether you’re an established business like us, (we’ve started to invest in eye-cream…) or a recently founded venture we’ve been looking back at 2011 and discussing the essential practices any business should follow to get through a recession.
1| Outsource to stay flexible.
Everything from staff to office space can be outsourced on a flexible basis so you don’t have to commit to on-going costs in times of uncertainty. Websites such as blurgroup.co.uk help you outsource marketing activities and Peopleperhour.com help with staff from a range of skill sets at all levels. Flexible office providers can also help you scale with workload and concentrate on your business.
2| Go to Macau on a business trip. Use the credit card.
3 | Maintain low Operating Gearing.
That is, to keep as many of your costs variable as possible, try to avoid committing to long term contracts that tie you in to paying a fixed amount every month so that if your income drops you’re not stuck with high committed costs. Outsourcing can be one way to achieve this.
4| Monitor Cashflow …tightly.
Cash is King – forecast your Cashflow prudently. Understand your customers so that you know about any potential problems with payment before they arise. Stay on top of debt. Focus on detail, small amounts add up.
5| Eat more chocolate. It will make you feel better.
6| Never stop moving – you can’t stand still.
Be prepared to adjust your product and pricing to the Market. Even if you’ve put together a successful formula in the past, now may be the time to review how you are doing things and understand how the wants/needs of your customers may have changed. It may also be the time to look further afield for business or at different ends of the market. Understanding your customer is always key.
7 | Have a vision that everyone can buy into, a common goal.
8| Surround yourself with people who are great at their job and trust them to do what they do best.
Success lies in having a great team with varied strengths, weaknesses and personalities. If the common denominator is hard work and a passion for the company then everything else falls into place.
Looking forward to the challenges of 2012!
Happy New Year from all at The Office Group.
Staying Green
Camden’s Environmental Services Fair invited us along to learn about staying green. We learnt a lot from their workshops – our favourite example of our learning is that The Office Gray’s Inn Road reduced its Carbon Footprint by 3.8% in the last year. Good fact.
But that’s not all. We know lots of the big hitters to reduce carbon emissions, which we’ve incorporated into our green roofs, but there are lots of simple ways to reduce greenhouse gases as well. And we thought we should pass the Going Green spirit on…
So. First things first, what exactly is a Carbon Footprint?
your carbon footprint = the amount of greenhouse gasses emitted by your organisation.
Your business can reduce its Carbon Footprint with very little effort. Simply pick at least 2 or 3 from the below suggestions and you will make a world of difference to our planet.
Electronics
Computers
A computer left on overnight uses 1Kwh of electricity; if 1,000 people turned off their computers when they went home they would save 180 tonnes of CO2 emissions every year. On average an office wastes £6000 each year by leaving equipment on over weekends and bank holidays.
Laptops
If you are replacing a computer, consider a laptop as they are much more energy sufficient
Kettles
Electric kettles are in frequent use and consume surprisingly large amounts of electricity. Please use the hydro taps provided for you when possible, the kettles should only be a Plan B.
Paper
Junk Mail
Send it back in the prepaid envelopes and ask to be removed from the database-trees have been cut down to create this waste. For your own marketing- why not use e-mail?
Invoices
Consider using electronic invoices instead of paper: you can create your invoices as PDF documents and email them to customers.
Filing/Storage
Question whether you need to continue filing and storing paper copies of letters, invoices, reports and suchlike. Instead of hard copies, back up electronic versions daily onto external hard drives or CDs. If you do need paper files or folders, buy recycled if possible.
Recycling
Use the bins provided in the kitchens for your recycling. If you produce a lot of paper waste you can get your own recycling bin for your office. First Mille collect the recycling sacks ever week and can also provide confidential waste sacks or electronic waste sack for your old electronic equipment
Deliveries
Where possible change your ordering so that you order occasional large consignments rather than ordering small amounts when you need them. The fewer number of deliveries, the smaller your carbon footprint
Travel
Cycling
Bikes are a great way to get to work- they are cheap, carbon neutral, easy to park, often quicker than cars, and good exercise. If not- buses are one of the most energy-efficient ways to travel.
Cabs
if you must take one book through us! We use Ecoigo Car Services who are committed to combating global climate change.
Lifts
Don’t waste electricity- use the stairs! Reduce your carbon footprint and get fitter in the process.
Lift Sharing
If you must take the lift, travel with someone else. Don’t take an empty lift or wait for others to make their journeys first.
Air Travel
Consider the train when travelling to meetings abroad. Air travel is particularly damaging to the environment, adding much more CO2 to the atmosphere than any other form of travel. Now we have a hgh speed train link to to Europe, trains give a fast and environmentally friendly way of travelling, are as quick as flying in many cases, drop you in the middle of a city, and your carbon footprint will be about ten times smaller if you travel by train rather than plane. When planning conference, choose a destination that you can reach by train. ( and think trains when you plan your holiday too).
Gas/Heating/Lighting
Lights
We use energy-efficient light bulbs in all of our buildings which last 12 times longer than normal bulbs and use 1/5 of the energy. Encourage your staff to use natural light when available and make it clear that the last to leave is responsible for switching the lights off.
Heating
Heating your office during the winter months is a large proportion of your overall energy use, here are a few simple actions you can take in your office to reduce your energy use and therefore your carbon footprint:
1| simply turn your radiators down! turning then down 1% will make a 10% difference.
2| The radiators are all on automatic timers to suit business hours- if you are leaving early or will be out of the office for a day turn them right down to 0.
Air-Conditioning
Running an air-conditioning unit ads on average about 50% to energy bills, air-conditioning is extremely energy hungry and increases your greenhouse gas emissions drastically.
General
Plants
Have plants in your office to ‘green’ your workplace. Plants are very effective at reducing air pollution in enclosed spaces.
Go Vege!
14% of the worlds greenhouse gases come from meat industry. Going vegetarian is the easiest and quickest way to lower your carbon footprint, reduce pollution, and save energy and water.
Make your office greener this winter and join us in the fight against climate change. It’s so easy yet it feels so good.
The Office Team
London Design Festival
There were the blockbusters such as John Pawson’s Perspectives at St. Paul’s, the Bouroullec Brothers’s Textile Field and Amande Leverte Architect’s 3D Timber Wave. And then there was everything else. The whole of London has been dripping with design over the last week and here’s a few of our favourite things.
John Galvin’s Manolo Lounger at Designer’s Block is a beautifully crafted piece which takes inspiration from Finn Juhl and the heel of a Manolo Blanhik. Boasting the lack of a 90 degree angle anywhere in the design, its low-slung stance is set off by subtle curves which are the key to its immediate success. It was launched in May at the Saatchi Gallery and is moving onto The Philadephia Museum of Art in November.
John explains the production process behind The Manolo Lounger
The attention to detail in the piece is characteristic of Galvin’s work. Based in Glasgow’s West End the designer uses a wood lathe to hand spin brass switches, bolts and handles. His collection ranges from head boards with secret compartments, hat-stands, framed mirrors made from whisky casks and a speaker made out of South American Purpleheart timber (the density of the wood apparently does wonders for the sound quality). Galvin’s persistence of a 1950s urban feel runs through his range of work, however there’s a lingering of something rugged which disrupts the tendency to perfection.
Just along from Galvin in Designer’s Block was JAILMake, a creative partnership of Liam Healy and Jamie Elliot. Based in South London the pair focus on how people, things and space interact and effect each other. Add an emphasis on local craftsmanship and sustainability and we arrive at two products The Reseeding Brick and The Plantable.
arbortecture at work - a term that has developed in recent years to describe the phenomenon where plants grow, uninvited, out of cracks in the walls of buildings
The first is a London brick impregneated with seeds of herbs and wild flowers which can be placed in gaps left in old brickwork, encouraging arbotectural growth in the city. The Plantable encourages growth in your own home – a table whose four legs form trellises for plants to grow up. Liam reveals a philosophical layer to the project as it ‘reflects upon the distance we place between ourselves and the processes involved in making our food’. It’s fun, looks great and makes you think – although maybe not always about sustainable food processes.
Table legs also featured in de vorm’s offering over in the Tramshed on Rivington Street. Reflecting the atmosphere of their buildings, designer Jorre van Ast’s minimalist Clamp-a-Leg consists of white steel bracket on ash – a far cry from JAILmake’s handmade steel-framed legs.
.
The point of the design is to turn any surface into a table. A product that’s great for street magpies but which also eliminates that decision that most urban-dweller has faced: dining-room or living room? Just latch on the legs and you have both.
Innovative design for urban living was dealt with by members of the Korea Design Membership, Juhee Han and Miyeon Kim. Based on the design of the traditional toy ‘Ttaki’, their SLAP Bag is both a bag to carry your things to the park and becomes a mat to sit on when there.
Quarterre‘s furniture for bikes doesn’t technically have a double function, but when there are no bike’s attached they could be pieces of sculpture and that’s function enough for us. Previously housed in Clerkenwell Workshops during Clerkenwell Design Week they had a something of a cramped change of scenery in cyclist’s paradise Look Mum, No Hands on Old Street. With three different designs to choose from they’re perfect for any design-forward home, cafe or workplace which needs to incorporate bike storage into the immediate environment.
Last but not least here’s a run through of this year’s attempts to rethink the Arco Lamp. Chicako Ibaraki‘s tribute to Dan Flavin Lime Light was back in all its minimalist beauty and was accompanied by the less extreme Arco Rod by Plant and Moss and Beplushave‘s The Arq.
Of course there’s so much more. Concrete Wall Collection and Dare Studio once again stole the show at 100% Design and both Søren Rose Studio and Benjamin Hubert‘s collaborations with De La Espada caught us scribbling down purchase dates and pricing.
There was so much to see and do we must have missed some gems – do let us know what your favourites were and fill in any crucial blanks.
The Office Team
The Task.
Task chairs.
We don’t want you to actively encourage you to navigate away but open a new tab and google image search ‘task chair’ and you’ll see what we’re up against. They’re not all this bad, but here’s the classic below (in a range of invigorating colour):
We tried, we really searched. We met with architects, furniture guys, friends of people’s friends but there wasn’t one that fitted the bill. Which is something like: a comfortable, easily moved piece of furniture that you could sit in all day, and still be productive.
So we finally bit the bullet and made our own – or rather we found two guys (both called James) who would do a much better job than we would.
The James’
James Harrison and James Kinmond are James UK who we met during Clerkenwell Design Week this year. We loved several of their pieces – which we bought – and lamented the fact that they didn’t have something like a task chair. However they’d been thinking of adding a task chair-type-design to their repetoire et voila, a match made in heaven.
James UK was founded after completing a degree in 3D Design in Newcastle with a desire to bring classic designs that had been ‘lost in time’ back to life. Their Wingback Chair takes the iconic design (one of the million versions of which is below left . . . ) to meet a Danish James Bond – understated, a little serious but really very inviting.
Then there’s the Aiken Lounge Chair. It emerges clean and proud from something of a hybrid background. A sledge base is at once reminiscent of a rocking chair, a ski-seat and a Kofod-Larsen blurring the boundaries between archetypal interior and exterior furniture. Perhaps it’s this blurring which makes it perfect for our club concept where work space sits alongside lounge space, dining areas and focus booths.
By reflecting on classic design they produce modern pieces and their production method follows a similar route. With a focus on hardwoods they’re dedicated to British industry sourcing traditional woodworking skills and complementing them with modern technology. They spend a large part of their time finding British companies and timber experts to work with and as a start-up it was the difficult route to take. James Harrison pinpointed the challenge as ‘finding someone big enough to handle the orders and small enough to execute the detail’.
And it’s this quality that they’ve found in British production that they can’t ignore. They did explore other options but have always come back. Undeniably this decision is spurred on by the feel-good contribution it makes to our current economy but also for the environment. No lugging huge swathes of timber across oceans means they’re checking a very large sustainable box – something which most furniture producers find very hard to achieve.
More information can be found on their website http://www.jamesuk.com/ and you can meet them in person in things like Clerkenwell Design Week and the upcoming London Design Festival which starts next Friday, 16th September. Will let you know where asap.
And here’s they are!
The Office Team
lights at the end of the tunnel
So the builders are still in (we’re pretty sure there are cups of tea involved down there) but we’ve got the lights up and finally some colour on the walls – spot the russet in the focus booths at the back?
Less than two weeks until opening . . . Although we’re still waiting for the coffee to arrive, it’s going to live in the Sacred Coffee Lodge here ↓↓↓
We just need to stop arguing over which coffee to get. Feel free to jump into the heated debate as we really need a casting vote.
Did we mention it was two weeks?
The Office Team
The Mobile Workstyle
Back in May the guys at Gist locked down their four reasons why they think the new workstyle is mobile. To sum up:
1| app marketplaces – which is pretty much IT becoming self-sufficient as people get more and more capable using smartphones, tablets et al, and so no we longer need IT support or training
2| ‘screening’ – meaning you can complete all sorts of work regardless of location or device
3| multiple communication channels
4| ‘a true on/off switch’ – it might be risky to rely on the discipline to switch off when you can access work everywhere but the upside is you can work with all the capabilities of an office whenever and from wherever you want
They’ve now followed this up with this excellent infographic (who doesn’t love an infographic?) laying out how enabled we are by smartphones and the increasing level of computing power available in our hands.
Some interesting stats have come out of their research such as from Cisco’s study on the international workplace 3 out of 5 say they don’t need to be in the office to be productive.
Interactive Technology and collaborative working
Whilst checking out the Core77 Design Awards, Bell Labs Global Whiteboard designed by New York based Potion got us once again musing on the impact collaborative working is having on the way we work. The whiteboard has been developed to present every paper and patent published by Bell Labs (such as the telephone – yep it’s Alexander Graham Bell ) which appear in bubbles in the background as the user searches for products, authors and concepts.Researchers working for Bell Labs are therefore presented with a range of information they might otherwise never have searched for, creating links between concepts and sparking inspiration.
Bell Labs researchers are working interactively with database information in a similar way collaborative meetings work with ideas – it just allows them to easily pull and consolidate the ideas they want to keep. What’s also great about this kind of whiteboard technology is that it allows you to work interactively in an unstructured way – cutting out those awkward moments in video conferencing or conference calls when everyone speaks at once.
Interactivity rather than collaboration is the focus of the design. The information itself isn’t any more or less findable than in some kind of computer database but by presenting the researcher with similar concepts they might not have otherwise searched for the whiteboard inspires the researcher. What’s interesting is that it also encourages them to work within Bell Labs company values – helping them to support and sustain their brand whilst innovating new design.
Of course, how you work as a company is increasingly woven into who you are as a brand. Whether you’re open plan, all offices, cubicles, tablet-based, SBU or project-driven teams now overshadow the classic Mac vs PC identity challenge. As considered in our last blog, work environment has a proven effect on the productivity of your company and we’ve several companies who’ve deliberately customised their space to suit the way they work, whether it’s a colour scheme, space planning or a full refurb to fit their changing needs. Broader communication and collaboration solutions have meant that the way we work has moved away from the traditional office depicted below. The trend instead is to branch into fragmented collaborative areas.
Clients are not only using the spaces throughout the building, lounge areas, meeting rooms, roof gardens, terraces, kitchens for informal discussions but now companies are starting to design their offices in a similar manner; physical space is adapting to our new ways of working. Instead of cubicle workers many teams are now project-based, cross-functional and work on trains between meetings and globally-based offices. Companies are installing hot-desking areas within their office space for people who aren’t based their all the time.
That’s not to say that the office is dead. There will always be a need for companies to have a space to be at home, it’s just that the way we interact with information is changing and this is encapsulated by the Potion’s Global Whiteboard. Self-sufficient and intuitive IT means we’re interacting more and more with stored information in a way we’ve never done before. But how far can interaction with technology take us, is this type of interaction just fun but faux-collaboration?
The Office Team
Lifi: the future of wireless working
It’s already enough to make us curl our toes and start deep-breathing but as more and more people use smartphones, ipads, GPS systems the more frustrating public wifi will become. Whether you’re working from a cafe, stealing it from a neighbour, wrestling with a dongle or competing for bandwidth in an airport or a conference you’ve encountered the anxiety of the dreaded slow bandwidth.
The frustration of bad wireless is topped only by how unreliable it can be. Fibre-Optic Communication has revolutionised the way we work and communicate making long-distance calls, file-sharing and collaborative online work feasible. We’ve laid fibre lines in all our buildings and know how work intensive and costly the process is, placing it out of reach for many public buildings and home usage. Haas’ idea removes this costly installation process, his so-called ‘D-Light’ taps into an overlooked source of fibre that’s all around us – in lightbulbs.
Data is sent through an LED lightbulb, it’s the same idea behind infrared remote controls, but far more powerful. So the infrastructure is already there, it’s available everywhere there’s a lightbulb and it’s secure as the data is only sent where the light is.
Haas says his invention can produce data rates faster than 10 megabits per second, which is speedier than your average broadband connection. You can imagine a whole world of possibilities where public wifi (through street lamps) is just the tip of the iceberg. From chemical plants where radiowaves are too dangerous, aircrafts cabins, hospitals and traffic control.
The future is looking very bright.
The Office Team
Productive Spaces
The Coworker’s Experience
A recent survey by industry experts Deskmag looked into what coworkers are looking for in places to work. Deskmag found that for the majority of co-workers, an ideal co-working space would have a mixture of open shared working areas, as well as smaller closed rooms for private conversations. Workplace layout and design was ranked as the most important factor.
The Compelling Pseudo-Science
This experience was explored in an enticingly scientific way by architecture critic Tom Dyckhoff. In a current 4OD series he’s looking into the impact building design can have on us – on our identity and self-esteem, and on relationships, the way we interact and the way that we work.
In this clip he explains how architecture and the environment are linked to the way our brain produces new cells. If you’re reading this you were probably taught that our brains stop producing new cells at the age of 21 or 23 if you’re lucky. Thankfully this has now been revised and scientists now say we in fact keep producing them for the whole of our lives. And our environment is a contributing factor in how much they grow.
When moving between different environments there was a 15% volume growth over one month, proving that it’s more productive to work from a variety of spaces. Ok. So he’s talking about mice here, but apparently mice and humans have similar hypothalamus’s ….or is it hypothalami?
Here’s the latest on the space… ok, so it looks very similar to our last shot but it’s all going to come together in a flash.
The Club Concept - still in the chrysalis phase
The Office Team
Work in Progress
Welcome to The Club Concept. It’s a productive space to work, to meet and to run your business from… as and when you want to. The way we work is changing. Technology with iPads (OK, and other tablets), laptops and Wifi means we can be more mobile and work on the move. We might be running around between meetings or needing to get away from our desks because we’ve been there for the whole day. Or we may have our main office in another location and need a regular work hangout that’s easy to find and feels like our business home. Touch down space, hot-desking, co-working, call it what you like, it’s a space to go to that is reliable, secure, had a power-supply, wireless, great coffee and by the way, is designed beautifully as well.
We’re opening our first one in September 2011 in Warnford Court in The City, near Bank and Liverpool Street stations. We’re currently on site doing the refurbishment work. Check out the photos,
This is our grand plan:
This is how it’s currently looking:
Keep your eyes peeled to the blog for weekly updates on the building progress.
The Office Team