Determining the correct office size for your team can be a challenge when you consider how your business might grow. You shouldn’t need to worry about expanding your team when hunting for office space, so here’s how to ensure you’re getting enough for everyone—with a little wiggle room for expansion.
How to Choose the Right Office Size for a Growing Business
Figuring Out Your Optimal Office Size
Small businesses are faced with countless challenges, and unfortunately one of them is finding the right space for your people to work in. While there are plenty of office leases near you, how do you know which one will fit your people and work with your expansion plans without being out of your budget?
Set Your Budget
Let’s slow down and take a look at the first concern any business owner has: their bottom line. Preparing your finances for a move into a new office is difficult, and there’s no perfect way to plan for it. When shopping for real estate, make sure you’re getting all the details on the cost of a space upfront. Are utilities like electricity and heat included, or are these additional costs? Are there thresholds within your lease that you need to stay within for these utilities (otherwise you must pay overages per month)? How about other necessary infrastructure like office furniture, high-speed internet, and meeting rooms? Knowing what’s included in your base lease and whether there are additions available is crucial. Read and review any lease agreements thoroughly, and make sure you’re not surprised by additional rent or costs each month later down the road. But how do you know the typical office size is right for your team count, and how do you make sure you have room for your workforce to grow naturally?
Do the Math
Calculating the basic amount of space that you need for a team is simplified to an equation by many professional office planners. They state that you need anywhere from 100-200 square feet per employee. This is the simplest raw space requirement for determining your office size, and it should be noted that there’s a lot more that can go into determining how many people can comfortably work within a given space. We always recommend being liberal in your space requirements, and not just for growth purposes. Overcrowded offices often lead to increased interpersonal tension between people; it’s just science. At our core, people need a certain amount of space to work and relax in, and when that need isn’t met, you’ll start to notice quickly.
Consider the Extras
Ensuring that your employees have access to basic necessities and extra amenities is crucial for keeping morale high and your team happy with the work they do. Many offices include a lot of common space for amenities like breakrooms, restrooms, and showers or workout facilities. Offering your people extra space ensures that nobody feels cramped in their workspace and people have room to stretch out.
Choose the Layout
Raw space is important, but how it’s used in an office is critical to ensuring you’re getting the right bang for your buck. Many offices might have a lot of square footage, but once you get there, you find it to be a bit cramped. Space is a lot more than just a number, and there’s one thing square footage doesn’t account for: verticality. Office space can quickly feel cramped if ceilings are low or a great deal of space is used on common areas or lobbies for clients. It’s critical that you visit a prospective office space for lease to get a lay of the land and make sure the layout can work for what you need to do. Does the office furniture layout allow for expansion, if necessary? Can desks and cubicles be moved closer together to accommodate new hires, or is space already at a premium? Are private offices too big and too plentiful for your collaborative workspace? Consider how your people will work and the best way to plan the office environment. An office space with rigid layouts won’t enable team growth the same way that a more open space could, so if there are a lot of walls within an office, growing in the space will be more challenging.
Leave Conventional Office Space Behind
Beyond the logistical issues that a traditional office for lease can pose for growth, offices also just feel outdated in today’s workspace climate. Considering how many teams have remote or hybrid employees who enjoy working from home and find it productive, planning your space around a number can be difficult. Coworking spaces have risen in popularity in the last 20 years as a comfortable place to grow your small business, leasing office space within a bustling community of professionals doing all kinds of work. These spaces are often flexible in how much room they offer, and the leases in a coworking space are generally much clearer and established on transparency, unlike the sometimes shady network of office landlords who have been dominating the market for decades. In Nashville, Center 615 offers a coworking space that has offices in a variety of sizes for teams of two or 55. The perks and amenities available here are modern and great for encouraging your teams to do their best, most productive work.
What If You Outpace Your Estimates?
No matter how much work you put into planning and preparing for your team’s size to increase, you can’t predict the market. A sudden boom in productivity or a huge new client can suddenly make it necessary to hire a lot more people all at once. Growth should be celebrated, not stressed about. At Center 615, you can add office space to your lease at any time with no penalty, giving you one less thing to worry about when you should be celebrating your business’s accomplishments and planning for staffing. Office space sizes here range from 100 square feet all the way up to 2,700 SF of connected workspace. We also offer a 10% multiple suite discount if separate spaces are needed for multiple employees or teams doing very different work. We work hard to ensure that our clients can grow without worrying about running out of space, and the opposite is true too. If you do need to downsize, you can at no penalty, and you won’t be paying for space that you’re not using.
Center 615 is a coworking space in the heart of Nashville that’s ready to host you and your growing business. If you’re looking to find a place that will grow with you, give us a call today for a free tour and immediate answers to any of your questions.
