3 Realizations on the Path to Hybrid

I have been involved with office moves and logistics support for most of my career. Office moves can be grueling. I spent years saying “I don’t have enough emotional distance to discuss that project…” after a particularly ugly 500-person corporate relocation. I was experienced, but I still wasn’t prepared for how the last couple of years have changed the modern office for Mavenspire and its clients.

Technology consulting is a business that naturally lends itself to a hybrid work experience. Our technical experts and account executives historically move around between projects and clients; between the trips are visits to the office, training opportunities, and some focus time with their families. It’s a familiar challenge to enable a mobile workforce to operate from home, office, and client site as efficiently as possible.

Despite that – everything is new. The last 18-24 months have seen the rise of cloud computing, a pandemic, the shift to video conferencing as a primary communication method, and a focus on work from home.

For our engineering staff this means less physical installation of equipment, and more marathon video meetings to implement new technology and solve challenges. It also means longer hours from home offices with occasional team sessions at corporate offices.

For account executives, they can no longer meet with people in person, or to take clients to lunch (a huge loss for the foodie culture at Mavenspire). Meeting prospective clients is a challenge because office phones don’t always ring to home offices, and email is overloaded with noise.

As we travel the confusing path out of the pandemic, I’ve spent a lot of time rethinking Mavenspire’s approach to the modern office and I made three key realizations:

·??????Flexibility is key – The video conference feels ubiquitous now, but let’s be honest; it’s not great for establishing new relationships or onboarding new team members. With that in mind, we need the flexibility to have in-person facilities close to where our clients and staff are located – regardless of their physical locations.

·??????We should focus on making it easy to collaborate and meet with people - Creating easy, low drama methods of getting together in ways that support corporate culture are important to the health and growth of our organization. Our staff should feel like part of a larger team, should feel supported, and should feel that it’s not “troubling someone” to get together and solve problems.

·??????We should take this opportunity to better support our geographic territory - Mavenspire works with people all over the world, but our home territory spans North Carolina to New Jersey. We need to find ways to make that easier for our staff and clients alike.

With those realizations in mind, this is our first experiment, a minimum viable product, if you will:

·??????Having ONE Annapolis-based office doesn’t really line up with the new reality but we recognize that our Annapolis identity is important to our culture, so we right-sized Annapolis. Our space is smaller now, but it’s focused on helping our staff to collaborate with each other in person and through video conferencing.

·??????We are exploring options at WeWork, Regus, and some hotel chains to create flexible access to conference rooms and desks for our staff. Our reconfigured space is tight for an all-staff meeting and as we grow, we won’t fit and we’ll need conference room space elsewhere. Some people like working from home, but others need a quiet place to focus (which is definitely not home when your 4-year-old doesn’t have school or camp). For employees that aren’t right around the corner from Annapolis, we want to give them a work space that lets them feel productive.

·??????We are encouraging our team to think about how to make meetings closer to where clients work (home or office), but still be able to get them out of the office (and potentially even feed them ??),

·??????We are encouraging our team to also think about foregoing Teams and instead, getting together for meetings with colleagues in-person, around where they are or need to be.

Over the next 6-months, we’ll gather data to validate or invalidate our assumptions, namely:

·??????We need a physical office in Annapolis. With other options closer to home, will people choose the Annapolis location for meetings?

·??????People will use mobile office space. How often do employees really need to get out of their homes? Will prospects and clients leave their homes to meet in person at a shared office space close to them? Will we figure out how to creatively feed them if we can lure them out?

·??????Onboarding is more successful in-person. Despite our shrinking office space, we anticipate the next 12 months will require substantial personnel growth. We onboarded 8 employees remotely during the pandemic and honestly…It wasn’t great. Can we use our mobile office spaces to create an onboarding experience that brings new employees into the Mavenspire culture?

We are clear on one thing – this is a brave new world, and we are still learning.

Is your organization looking at office space differently now? How are they approaching creation of a modern office?