Working in the office five days a week was the norm before COVID. But those days are long gone. Today, the average office attendance is 3.5 days per week. That’s because in the post-pandemic era, 90% of organizations now offer hybrid schedules, allowing employees to split their time between working remotely and coming into the office.
With employees working in-person less frequently than they used to, employers are now forced to rethink how they manage their office space. They need to account for declining office attendance and offer flexible workspaces.
Read on to learn how office management is changing in today’s workplaces. You’ll also discover how to make it effective in your company with modern workspaces from providers like Industrious.
What Is Office Management Today?
Office management involves planning, coordinating, and controlling everything that keeps the office functional and efficient. The person in charge of these operations is called an office manager. Their key responsibilities include:
- Organizing office layouts: Arranging furniture and equipment in a way that makes the best use of available space
- Ordering office supplies and equipment: Making sure teams have what they need to do their jobs
- Optimizing space usage: Ensuring the organization uses its workspaces efficiently and cost-effectively while supporting employee needs
- Keeping the office in good shape: Handling office repairs and upgrades to maintain a comfortable working environment
- Overseeing administrative tasks: Managing office budgets, coordinating team meetings, and more
In the past, office managers focused on supporting in-person teams. Today, they’re expected to create spaces that work for on-site, remote, and hybrid employees.
Organizations that don’t keep up with this trend risk paying for underused space. Effective office management eliminates unnecessary space costs and keeps you on top of trends by offering what employees want from the workplace.
Types of Office Management: From Traditional to Hybrid
Office management can be centralized or decentralized. Understanding each type helps you choose the style most suited to your organization.
Centralized
With centralized office management, one manager or team takes care of office operations for the whole company. They make decisions about office supplies, layouts, tools, and policies across all locations.
Centralized management works well for small businesses with just one or a few offices. But once a company starts growing and adding more locations, it gets harder for a single person to manage all office operations effectively.
Additionally, this type of management is effective when going to the office is the only or the main way employees work. However, times have changed. Recent statistics show that 58% of employees in the United States have the option to work remotely at least one day a week. Another 35% have the opportunity to work remotely five days a week.
For this reason, office property management is shifting from the traditional centralized model to a decentralized one that accommodates in-person, remote, and hybrid work setups.
Decentralized
Instead of one person or group retaining full control, decentralized office management distributes decision-making power and operational responsibility to trusted leaders in different locations.
Companies with this type of management have multiple satellite offices (branches), typically close to where employees live. Each location might have its own office manager who makes decisions and runs day-to-day operations.
In remote and hybrid setups, teams are often spread out across cities, countries, or even continents. Decentralized office models provide local spaces where teammates in the same area can meet and collaborate when necessary.
By enabling teams to work in locations that are most convenient to them, decentralization empowers remote-first and hybrid office management.
Key Skills Every Office Manager Needs Now
What are the main qualities of a successful office manager?
- Tech fluency: Today’s offices rely on technology for nearly everything — from scheduling meetings and booking desks to organizing hybrid teams and managing budgets. A great office manager knows how to use digital office management solutions, which help them fit in well in the modern workplace and run the office more efficiently.
- Effective communication: Office managers interact with many people. They might chat with team members to coordinate meetings, touch base with senior leaders about reports, or talk with vendors to order supplies. All these duties require excellent communication skills, both written and verbal.
- Ability to multitask: Office management comes with many responsibilities that often need to be fulfilled at the same time. Multitasking skills enable managers to switch between responsibilities and take on multiple tasks without compromising the quality of their work.
- Strong vendor coordination skills: Office leaders manage all suppliers of office equipment. For this reason, they have to be good at tasks like researching vendors, requesting quotes, setting expectations, and negotiating contracts. In other words, they should be able to work effectively with suppliers.
- Employee support skills: An office manager is often the go-to person when someone needs help with equipment or just about anything related to the office. The leader should be able to listen to employees’ concerns, questions, or needs and find a suitable solution that helps them do their jobs comfortably and efficiently.
The Rising Complexity of Office Management
Office management teams have multiple responsibilities that keep increasing as organizations grow and adopt new work setups. Here are a few of their major roles that are increasingly complex:
- Maintaining the office: Office building management requires ongoing maintenance to ensure it operates effectively and safely. Upkeep tasks include handling repairs on systems like HVAC units and hiring facility staff to do regular cleaning. Effectively managing these operations in one large office is already difficult. It’s even more challenging when dealing with multiple offices in different locations.
- Providing tech support: Businesses are adopting more tech solutions to improve productivity and enable hybrid teams to collaborate. As a result, office management teams are expected to manage a growing number of technologies and offer employees tech support if necessary. This requires technical skills that not all office management teams may have.
- Coordinating meeting space: With flexible workspaces and hybrid teams, office managers must ensure that rooms are not only available but also equipped with the right technology for in-person and remote employees to meet. Setting up video conferencing tools is not always easy.
- Improving employee experience: Office managers are responsible for creating a work environment that satisfies employees, whether they work in the office full time or just a few days per week. Achieving that can take a great deal of effort.
Each office manager’s responsibility is difficult on its own. Combine them, and they become overwhelming, even for office management teams. Handling every operational detail and office procedure can be expensive, too, especially for businesses with a tight budget.
How Industrious Reduces Office Management Burdens
If you want to avoid the complexity of office management, a modern workspace provider like Industrious can be the perfect solution. With over 200 locations worldwide, your team can work from Industrious workspaces across the US, UK, Europe, Asia, and Australia — without the troubles of setting up and running offices on your own in these regions.
Industrious office solutions simplify modern office management in several ways:
- Move-in-ready spaces: Industrious provides on-demand coworking spaces, private offices, and suites for companies of all sizes. The spaces are fully furnished and ready for immediate occupancy.
- IT Infrastructure: In the modern workplace, businesses rely on digital technologies, such as fast and secure Wi-Fi, video conferencing tools, and access control systems to get things done. Industrious coworking spaces are tech-integrated, so you don’t have to worry about setting up the technologies yourself. If your team experiences a technical issue, on-site support ensures someone is there to fix it quickly.
- All-inclusive amenities: For most teams, basic office items like a desk and chair are not enough. Industrious workspaces come with all the extras you need to do your best work, including reliable internet, office supplies, and unlimited color printing. All amenities are part of your membership — no hidden or surprise fees.
- Flexible lease terms: Fixed, long-term leases make it difficult to customize office space based on team size. With Industrious, you choose how long you want your membership to last, whether that’s a month, six months, or a year. You can also cancel, upgrade, or downgrade your membership at any time. That way, scaling your office space to meet business needs is easy.
Supporting Flexible Work Through Smart Office Management
The hybrid work setup is here to stay, despite organizations’ recent back-to-office planning.
For this reason, organizations should invest in smart office management to ensure available spaces support flexible work. Industrious can help them achieve that. With Industrious enterprise solutions, you can find the space you need, whether you’re looking for:
- Rooms for holding in-person meetings
- Video-conferencing rooms fitted with audio-visual technology for hybrid meetings (virtual and in-person attendants)
- Private business office for team collaboration
- On-demand coworking spaces for team members who come to the office occasionally
Amenities That Drive Productivity and Employee Satisfaction
Today, employees expect more from their workplace. They want spaces that help them stay focused and feel supported at work.
Research shows that 86% of workers are likely to leave jobs that don’t support their well-being. Amenities like wellness rooms are one way of promoting employee wellbeing and boosting satisfaction.
On-site catering, tech-enabled workspaces, and fast, reliable Wi-Fi are other ways of providing employees with what they need to stay productive and feel supported. Industrious offices, suites, and coworking spaces come with these key amenities (and many others), so you don’t have to set up and manage them yourself.
Ready to Rethink Office Management With Less Effort?
Managing every operational detail of running an office is a lot of work, especially for lean office management teams. It can also be too expensive for small businesses.
With Industrious flexible office spaces, you say goodbye to office management complexity. You move into your ready-to-use workspace, and let us worry about running and maintaining the facility.
Choose an Industrious office location near you to start enjoying fully furnished workspaces and all-inclusive amenities.