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You’ve had little or no growth

Not every growing business needs to take on additional office space. Depending on your industry, you might need to hire more people who work in the field and not at a desk. If that’s the case, then you don’t need any additional square footage, and if your business is stable or has had little growth, the space that you’re in likely still works just fine.

You don’t have enough savings to move

Relocating can be expensive. Consider that you will need to pay for the physical move, the wiring, changing your letterhead, buying new furniture, and so on. Even if you find a space that could save you $100k on your next lease, it might not make financial sense because your move will eat up the entire cost savings, if not more.

You’re already in the perfect location

You love your building, your staff loves your building, and overall it works for everyone. What’s the expression? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it? The same goes here. If everyone is happy and business is good, then renew your lease.

You’re in a tightening market

In rare instances, there just isn’t any space available that meets your criteria. Depending on your market there can be a shortage of vacant space. If that’s the case, it’s crucial to fully understand the market so you can negotiate the best possible terms on a renewal. Your best bet is to hire a knowledgeable broker to do this for you.

You can negotiate better renewal terms

Since the day you signed your current lease, your expenses have been going up, in one way or another. Given that there will almost always be vacant space, it’s fair to at least take a look at what’s available. If you start looking, your current Landlord will almost always catch wind of it and will do as much as they can to get you to stay. That usually means reducing the rent, updating your space, or one throwing in other types of concessions. As long as your Landlord is offering fair terms and you’re happy with your situation, then renewing is probably the path of least resistance.

In case you haven’t heard, private offices and cubicles are obsolete. Companies large and small in nearly all industries are migrating toward open-plan office designs. Apart from the cost efficiency that comes from accommodating more employees in less physical space, the primary goal is collaboration. Studies show that employees of high-performing companies spend more time in collaborative activities than their counterparts in average-performing firms. Office design, in turn, has a major impact on how employees collaborate with each other. It’s hard to argue that open bench seating isn’t far more conducive to collaboration than rows of cubes and offices with doors.

One of the most influential business leaders of modern history understood this intuitively. Steve Jobs famously dictated that all the restrooms at Pixar’s then-new office campus be located in the center of the building. The idea was to force employees of all ranks and roles to have chance meetings with each other several times each day. The same general idea has since caught on more broadly with constant collaboration now designed into employee workstations themselves. Walls and private space are out, transparency and mobility are in.

The downside of openness

However, there is a strong counterpoint to the open-plan paradigm. A few years ago, Time.com published an article that described the open office as “a hotbed of stress.” According to Annie Murphy Paul, a noted expert on human learning, “several decades of research have confirmed that open-plan offices are generally associated with greater employee stress, poorer co-worker relations and reduced satisfaction with the physical environment.” The articles goes on to describe a study in which the “low-intensity noise” of an open office environment is shown to reduce the mental stamina of test subjects. A more recent study by the Dublin Institute of Technology confirmed this point of view. In a survey of 150 knowledge workers across various age groups and industries, 63% of those working in an open plan environment said that the design of their office space had a negative impact on their ability to focus and concentrate.

Then again, the Dublin study also validated the “pros” of the open plan. Fully 80% of survey respondents, presumably including those who found it difficult to concentrate, admitted that an open plan had a positive impact on collaboration with others. Similar positive opinions were voiced in regard to team cohesion, knowledge sharing and social interaction.

Finding the right balance

And therein lies the trade-off. Open-plan office designs are shown to improve collaboration and knowledge sharing but at the expense of heightened employee stress, dissatisfaction with the physical work environment and a reduced ability to concentrate on focused tasks. Is the end result a net positive or a net negative? Only you and your employees can say for sure, but it does lend credence to the recommendations of the Dublin team and office design experts everywhere.

If you do pursue an open-plan design for your office space, be sure to invest in noise mitigation measures and provide ready access to private spaces where employees can “hide out” from the openness. The ideal office environment appears to be a hybrid with some spaces that encourage free-flowing collaboration and other spaces that enable employees to wall themselves off – whether that be physically, mentally, visually or sonically – to focus on the task at hand.