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I really liked Shopify's remote model of not closing offices, but turning them into "ports" for teams in major cities to get together throughout the year for pl

• dcchambers 4y ago
  We have done the same at Zendesk. We've reduced our office footprint but have kept our hubs open with large enough offices open for the occasional large on-site and for easier team collaborations, as well as space for anyone that prefers to work in an office environment. I like the model, but I question long term economic viability of owning that much office space with mostly low utilization and only occasional spikes.
  • frognumber 4y ago
    I suspect a pathway might be: 1) Open offices for collaboration 2) Shared offices for collaboration (like co-working spaces) with reservations, as well as off-site retreats to places like Hawaii. This is cheaper than leasing in big cities. 3) Cost-cutting during the next recession killing those fancy co-working spaces and retreats 4) Loss of team cohesion
  • ilyt 4y ago
    Could rent it as co-working space on the rest of the days
    • nordsieck 4y ago
      > Could rent it as co-working space on the rest of the days Or just downsize the office to the point where utilization is high and rent out co-working space themselves during the "spikes".
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • toomuchtodo 4y ago
    I'd be interested what the financial analysis looks like leasing or owning hubs vs a cadence of offsites annually remote first orgs usually hold, considering meeting space + hoteling for staff during the meet. I'll chip in for this analysis and blog post!
    • WorldMaker 4y ago
      That sounds like an interesting analysis, but I'm curious if this is one of those moments where economics around it will be deeply shifting over the next few years and any analysis will likely have to adjust frequently. For instance, even before the remote work shift in 2020 many cities were heavily competing on conference and hotel space allocations for an interesting variety of economic reasons (tourism dollars that float alongside, for instance). As more "corporate Downtown" downsizes their office footprints to go more remote, some of that real estate inventory is going to go to apartments and condos, but also I would expect that there would be just as much pressure to convert it to hotels and conference space and WeWork-style hoteling office space. I wonder if that's going to snowball into dirt cheap conference prices in a growing list of cities. Especially if you start to factor in non-traditional "hub" cities (especially those non-traditional for tech). I've heard that's an appeal of Denver, Colorado as an annual onsite retreat city for remote first orgs as it has a large conference and hotel inventory that still has some very cheap periods outside of the usual tourist periods. I can point out that cities like Louisville, KY and Indianapolis, IN have massive inventories of hotel and conference (and exposition) space with some incredibly cheap calendar windows and still heavily competing among each other for more hotel/conference inventory every year. (I can also suggest which of those two cities in particular has better tourism options, but that may as much be hometown bias, so I'll save it.)
      • code_biologist 4y ago
        I'll also point out that Louisville has amazing whiskey distilleries downtown, the "urban bourbon trail". Great for hashing out tech and product disagreements!
      • quacksilver 4y ago
        I have been to some fun offsites in Puerto Vallarta. I imagine other Mexican / central American towns/resorts are also available. It was cheap compared to a US city, everyone could fly there quickly and you could hang around as a tourist by booking FTO afterwards and delaying your flight back. (company didn't care if you picked a cheaper flight home a week or two later when expensing).
  • CydeWeys 4y ago
    > I like the model, but I question long term economic viability of owning that much office space with mostly low utilization and only occasional spikes. Oh for sure it doesn't make any sense, and is driven solely by the inertia of already having the office space. You'd let it go over time as leases lapse until you're down to just a tiny amount that's facing high utilization.
  • BurningFrog 4y ago
    It also makes sense as a hedge if the WFH trend fizzles out.
    • MonkeyClub 4y ago
      It won't fizzle out, if the 15-minute city plans are anything to go by: work global, live local.
  • whizzter 4y ago
    Depends, already years ago there was a hub-n-spoke-like model for office buildings where you had smaller offices for smaller companies that had the ability to temporarily rent the larger "shared" areas of the building. It didn't really take off afaik, but with more bigger and stable tenants making a larger bulk of these it might actually take off a bit as a model.
  • pkrotich 4y ago
    This is where co-working space (WeWork?) would work well. I just signed a 3 months contract for my team to meet at co-working place as needed to kickstart a project which in person meeting is important.
  • TheRealNGenius 4y ago
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  • octodog 4y ago
    Provided employee productivity is the same (or better) this model still has Zendesk ahead. It doesn't really matter if utilization is low - if you've closed 10% of your offices you're paying 10% less rent than you were before. Would there be opportunities for further efficiency by fully closing them and renting space a few times a year? Possibly, yes. But that doesn't mean the current model isn't an improvement on the previous one.
  • Aeolun 4y ago
    Well, you were paying for it before. Obviously it’s not a financial burden, or the company would have been unviable even before the pandemic. If you spend 10M/annum on salaries, is your 1M/annum for an office really a big burden?
• Raed667 4y ago
  Officies, especially the great ones (as in also very expensive) create an irrational emotional attachment and are very hard to downsize on them without impacting morale.
  • FollowingTheDao 4y ago
    It’s disturbing to think that people think human connection is irrational. I guess y’all forgot that that was how labor unions were formed.
    • Sebb767 4y ago
      It's not that the human connection is immoral, it's just that paying rent and heating for a pretty empty office space doesn't make much sense. As long as there is sufficient space for all the employees that want to go to the office, being against downsizing doesn't make much sense.
    • karmasimida 4y ago
      Office is where people used work, it is not a monument which I think many here seem to make it so If no one is working there anywhere it doesn’t need to exist
    • cheriot 4y ago
      human connection to a workplace is why unions formed? I thought it was the hours, dangerous working conditions, and unlivable pay.
    • microtherion 4y ago
      Having recently spent a few weeks in large, quite nice, but nearly empty offices (because I wanted to work in office for a change, but most of my cow orkers had other plans), I realized that holding on to oversized offices can backfire, because as nice as the space is, it felt somewhat demoralizing after a while to be nearly alone in such a vast building.
      • turdprincess 4y ago
• cacois 4y ago
  Doesn't that mean they still pay for the real estate? I wonder how viable it is to keep that cost on the books for ad-hoc usage.
  • Rafert 4y ago
    They were locked into long term leases anyway: https://storeys.com/shopify-the-well-toronto-office-space-sublease/ https://storeys.com/shopify-the-well-toronto-office-space-su...
• dweez 4y ago
  That had been GitHub's model for their SF HQ office, more or less. Some local people used it as their daily office, but there seemed to always be a mini-summit or get together of remote folks happening each week.
• jstummbillig 4y ago
  That seems alluring. I wonder how large of a percentage of employees would, if prompted directly, opt to have company funds directed to have "ports" in major cities, if it was entangled with their salary. Would you choose an additional 600$ a month and remote only, or would you vote for permanent variable spaces in major cities for events and team building?
  • nidnogg 4y ago
    Not me. Show me the money.
  • makestuff 4y ago
    As someone who goes in almost every day (I live close to my office and I enjoy getting out of the apartment). I wouldn't give up $600/mo for this, because management will never use that money for team events and travel. My team is spread out all across the country and we were told quarterly travel is no issue to all meetup in one of the cities that have an office. That went right out the door as soon as the economy went down. However, I can promise you that you wouldn't see that $600/mo back when you didn't get to travel. I think this will be the new version of "free lunch" that tech companies offer. Come work for X, we pay for quarterly travel to meetup with your remote coworkers!
  • swexbe 4y ago
    Except that's a false dichotomy and that money would go to the shareholders instead.
    • jstummbillig 4y ago
      Why would it? Even in the most cynical business sense, a business will spend as much money on employees as they must. Again, assuming maximal cynicism, they won't care if it's salary or "ports", as long as it's the most effective buck they can spend (think ROI). What is effective in attracting employees depends, at least partly, on what employees want. That might be either some amount of money into ports or more salary. Paying shareholders more will not attract employees.
• rco8786 4y ago
  Yea a lot of companies have done this to great effect - but I am curious to see what happens when lease renewal time comes. Paying for all that office space to remain ~empty 95% of the time does not look good on a budget.
• chadash 4y ago
  What is needed is something like WeWork for large office gatherings. Something between a WeWork and a hotel conference center. The former is not really made for big meetings. The latter is either very expensive, too large or too small. You need a space for 10-200 people to meet and collaborate... not a conference center.
  • TylerE 4y ago
    A space for 100-200 people sounds a LOT like a hotel conference center. They are very flexible spaces.
  • ecshafer 4y ago
    Almost every hotel has some kind of conference center. You can absolutely rent a conference center for 10 people for a week in any city in america.
    • red-iron-pine 4y ago
      and big conference centers are often highly booked and expensive; random hotels are often very cheap and easy to pull together with a couple of weeks notice. quality varies, but shop around. source: wrangled a few impromptu "conferences" at a local hotel near data centers.
• toraway1234 4y ago
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• SystemHacker_69 4y ago
  There’s actually a word for that: Decentralized decision making. Where you don’t need to physically be in the same room or even in the same country to have a fruitful discussion
• nonethewiser 4y ago
  Sure. Sounds nice. Wonder why they dont open more of them.