Proposal

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School

Lone Star College, CyFair *

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Course

2301

Subject

Management

Date

Feb 20, 2024

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docx

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Uploaded by elisenagutierrez

1 To: Management at Spectrum From: Elisena Gutierrez Subject: Office Space and Work from Home Date: 6/25/21 Introduction The issue we are currently facing is that Spectrum has outgrown its current office. We have been steadily hiring and there is not enough room for all the current employees to come in at once. We need to decide on whether to retain or reduce our current office space and keep most employees remote or upgrade our office space to accommodate our growing company. The purpose of this proposal is to recommend that we should permanently adapt our current work model, which consists of most employees primarily working from home. This decision also leads us to the recommendation of reducing our current office to a more suitable size based on the average number of employees we have coming in each day. The Covid-19 pandemic has changed the way our company currently conducts business. It has led to most of our workforce primarily working remote. Throughout the pandemic our company along with the number of employees have grown, but because of the current work from home structure our office capacity has not kept up. Now that we are recovering from the pandemic due to the release of a vaccine, we need to decide whether to upgrade our current office space to a larger one or retain/reduce the office space we have and continue the remote working model. I have gathered most of my information from Felicia, who has also spent a great deal of time gathering data related to this issue. I have also gathered some information on this issue from Mark Johnson, and his assessment of the problem aligns very much to Felicia’s, although his perspective on the potential solution differs. The scope of this proposal is to provide information on the issue we are facing with the office space and how we got there, provide a recommended solution to this issue, and lastly provide the reasoning behind our solution and why we are recommending it. This proposal will be fairly straightforward. We will cover in greater detail the current situation. Then, we will discuss our proposed plan to handle the situation. Finally, we will discuss the benefits and costs associated with our plan, including the budget for it and conclude the proposal. The goal of this proposal is to provide enough information so that leadership can make a well-informed decision to move forward with the proposed plan outlined here. Current Situation As touched on above, the problem we are facing is whether we should move permanently to remote work or upgrade our office space to accommodate our larger employee base. Our company work model going forward will be a key deciding factor on our decision. The cause of this problem has been due to the steady growth of our company while adopting to the pandemic

2 and not having to maintain a very large office presence. Our total employee count, including part time employees is at 28. Our office space has enough seating for only 26 employees at once. That includes our 4 assigned offices, 16 assigned cubicles, and 6 unassigned workspaces. If we do not come to a decision on this issue, then the possibility of bringing back our full workforce to the office simply cannot happen. Also, I understand there are no current plans to grow past 30 full time employees, but if that somehow changes, we could get to a point where even bringing in all the members on the same team becomes a challenge. We need to address this issue now before it becomes an even bigger dilemma with our ever-growing company. We need to have a plan on our company’s work structure as well to help us with coming to a decision on this issue. Employees are more anxious than ever to find out if and when they will have to come back to the office. While we are still in the transition to a post-pandemic world is the best time to make this decision for our company and set a standard going forward for how our company will conduct business. Plan The plan we are proposing is to move towards a hybrid approach. We want to have most employees working remote and eventually reduce the office space we currently have, but still allow employees the option of coming into the office at their convenience or when necessary. Due to the pandemic we already have most employees working from home and the infrastructure in place to support them. We have already obtained the licensing for zoom meetings and have it installed on everyone’s computer with it regularly being used. Therefore, the first phase in our plan to move to a hybrid model has already been done. With restrictions being lifted we do expect to have clients frequenting the office more. We will also see that some employees prefer to come into the office and work even if it isn’t every day. Our next step in the plan would be to implement a hoteling system for the office. This system will allow employees to go online and reserve a workspace in the office for the days they want to come in or need to meet with a client. There is readily available software to implement this. One of them being Chargifi. Chargifi provides an easy booking system that will show employees what desks are available in the office and let them reserve one. We would like to implement this software by July 1 st and start out by allowing employees the option to come in up to 3 days a week for the first Month. This way we can test out how well the system works and ease employees back into the office after being away so long because of the pandemic. Afterwards, assuming the hoteling system is working out we can allow employees the option to come in up to 5 days a week. Another technology we would like to implement for this hybrid approach is a feedback system. The reasoning behind the feedback system would be to stay aware of our employee’s experiences and if they are satisfied with the hybrid work model. It would also give us a chance to receive ideas for improvements on the model that we can implement down the line. A popular software that already exists for feedback is 15five. 15five will allow us to send out a questionnaire to our

3 employees at the frequency we want with the questions we choose. We would like to implement this software at the same time as Chargifi on July 1 st and send out a customized survey weekly. This will help us stay up to date with our employee’s feelings from the beginning of the process. Chargifi also allows you to track employee bookings. We propose tracking the number of employee bookings over a period of 6 months to gain sufficient data on how many employees come in each day. We would also like to track data from 15five over 6 months to see how employees have adjusted to the change. Once we have this data, we can then start looking for a smaller office space that will better suit the actual number of employees we have showing up to the office. We can use the 15five results to gain a perspective from our employees on our office space as well. Our timeline on finding a new office from the start of this plan on July 1 st would be 1 year. That will give us 6 months to collect data and then another 6 months to use that data to find where and what size our next office space will be. Qualifications I believe I would be best suited for taking on the task of achieving this project. I have previous experience in coordinating and planning events which I feel prepares me well for this task. I know how to plan things on a timeline and stick with the schedule, which I feel is a very important aspect to have this plan work out. I have also devoted many hours of research to thoroughly develop this plan, including having spoken to multiple employees to gain their perspective. I do believe I would have the highest success rate at ensuring the plan gets completed as expected and on schedule. Costs and Benefits The costs to implement this plan our very small. Chargifi offers a free basic tier that will serve all our needs and allows up to 30 users. 15five’s lowest tier that serves all our need’s costs $7 per person per month. Making it only $196 dollars per month and our current office space is costing us $2,942 per month. The current office space is 2100 square feet, if we move to a hybrid model and downgrade our office space even to account for ¾ of our current employee count we could downgrade to a space that is 1,575 square feet. This way we still maintain the same amount of room per person. That would drastically reduce our rent cost and at a minimum make up for the $196 dollars being spent on the extra software. The rest of the required software for remote work has already been purchased and is in use. Overall, the cost of going with the hybrid model of work would at the very least be the same as our costs now, and at the very best save us up to $1000 dollars a month depending on the size and rent of a new office space. Another benefit to the hybrid model is the amount of time it will save. There are two research teams, each containing 8 employees. That means at a minimum we have two all hands meetings per week at the office. Currently employees live an average of 10 miles from the office. Just looking at those meetings alone and not all the other smaller ones that take place, we will save

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4 320 miles total of driving each week. Not only would we save on miles, but that time could be better spent to increase productivity on real work. After being work from home throughout the pandemic a lot of employees have adapted to it. A lot of them like it for the pros it offers. Some of those pros are more free time during the day due to not having to spend time commuting, having a more relaxed dress code, and working in a more comfortable environment. These pros have made employees happier and this combined with our new feedback system will give us the push we need to really boost employee retention and increase our quality of work. As stated before, after discussing with Mark Johnson he had a potentially different solution that involved expanding our office space. He stated good reasons for this such as creating stronger social ties among new and older employees and leaving a better impression with clients who visit. I would like to address how our hybrid solution addresses them as well. I believe with the hoteling system in place that there will be enough employees in the office to at least not give off a bad impression of our company. Also, with many companies transitioning to remote work I believe our clients would be understanding and perhaps see us in a better light that we are adapting to the new work culture. As for creating stronger ties between employees, that is why I believe keeping the hybrid approach will work so well. An employee can still come in at their convenience and meet in person other employees at the company. Although we may be able to afford a higher rent now, that rent can cost us anywhere from $4000 a month to $10,000 a month depending on just how nice and large of a space we go with. I believe we can reinvest that extra money into the company and our growth. Lastly, I will discuss some of the cons of going with our proposed hybrid approach and downsizing to a smaller office. The biggest drawback I could potentially see would be after moving to a smaller office re-instating the old work structure of having everyone go in to the office. There would not be enough room and could cause us to spend more money than originally necessary to find a larger space in a short amount of time. That is why it is very important to be sure of the future work structure you want to have in place. Another con to our proposal is that we might lose some engagement among employees versus if they went into the office every day. If this does happen, we could use the feedback system to look for ways to bring back our employee engagement, potentially with ideas such as company sponsored events. Conclusion There are many things to consider when looking at the problem of whether our company should move to remote work or expand our office to accommodate all our employees. After researching and analyzing the numbers I believe the hybrid approach proposed here and downsizing our office makes the most sense. It saves the company money, employees their time, and gives employees the decision of whether they want to come in or stay home. It is the trend that we are seeing many companies shift to and the way of the future.

Proposal

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